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coPYRiGirr DEPosrr. 



Sugar and Salt- 
Foods or Poisons ? 




Axel Emil Gibson 



Sugar and Salt 



Foods or Poison? 



BY 
DR. AXEL EMIL GIBSON, 

Author of ^^ Prolonging Human Life 
Through Diet." 



WILL A. KISTLER COMPANY, PRINTERS 
LOS ANGELES 



r>^ 



^Kq. 






Copyright 1913, by 

DR. AXEL EMIL GIBSON, 

Published December, 1913 



FEB iu I9!4 

CI.A862513 



To 

Luther Burbank — 

whose untiring labors in the service of hu- 
manity have made him a prophet and a seer 
of the divine life in man and nature — is this 
little volume lovingly and gratefully dedicated. 



INDEX 

SUGAR— PART I 

Preface. 

I. Has the Popularity of Sugar a 
Scientific Basis? 

II. Sugar as an Extract, and Sugar 
as a Natural Product. 

III. The Constructive Phase of Sugar. 

IV. The Magic of a Chemical Formula. 

V. The Destructive Phase of Sugar. 

VI. Excess in Food-Failures as 
Nourishment. 

VII. The Philosophy of Excess and Bal- 
ance. 

VIII. The Difference between Organized 
and Unorganized Acids, and their 
Relation to Rheumatism. 

IX. The Peril of ^Tree Sweets." 

X. The Place of Sugar in the Hy- 
gienic Bill-of-Fare. 

XL Sugar an Explosive Force in the 
Human Dynamo. 



INDEX 

XII. Can Sugar Alone Maintain the 
Expenditure of Muscular Labor? 

XIII. Sugar as a Force. 

XIV. Sugar as a Fatformer. 
XV. Sugar as a Poison? 

XVI. Sugar as a Medicine 

XVII. The Moral AppUcation of ^T^ree 
Sweets." 



SALT— PART II 

XVIII. Evidence For and Against the Use 
of Salt. 

XIX. The Fundamental Purpose of Salt. 

XX. Salt at Once a Preservative and 
a Destroyer. 

XXL The Meaning of ^^The Salt of the 
Earth' ^ to Physiological Chem- 
istry. 

XXII. How Salt at Once can become 
the Savior and Destroyer of 
Life. 

XXIII. Can the Body Absorb Mineral 
Substances? 



8 



INDEX 

XXIV. The Fallacy of Dr. Willjamar 

Stephanson's Theories as to the 
Value of Salt. 

XXV. Why the Esquimo Abhors Salt in 
His Dietary. 

XXVI. Why Life in the Temperate Zone 
Needs Salt for its Maintenance. 

XXVII. Correspondence Between "Free 
Sweets" and Loose Morals. 

XXVIII. The "Salt'^ and the "Sweets'^ of 
the Earth. 

XXVIV. The Value of Salt in Medicine. 

XXX. The Value of Salt in Food. 



PREFACE 

When sitting at your breakfast-table and 
quietly enjoying the drink that cheers, but 
not inebriates, it may not occur to you 
that the lump of sugar you just slipped 
into your cup, relates you to principles 
and force-aspects that have the profoundest 
bearing, not only on your physical, but 
also on your mental and moral nature. 

For if thoughts are things, so, on the other 
hand, things must be thoughts. Proceed- 
ing from within, outward thoughts are things, 
while from without inward things turn into 
thoughts. They are interchangeable as-pects 
of cause and effect, and relate man to the 
sources and expressions of universal prin- 
ciples. 

This means that the principle of ''sweet- 
ness," which has in sugar its material ex- 
pression, has on the moral plane the subtler, 
but not less forceful expression of tempta- 
tion. In other words, the same principle 
which in the seductive form of sugar appeals 
to the gustatory instincts of the physical 
man, appeals with still greater force in 
the form of moral ''sweetness" to the inner 

man. 

Life is a woof, progressing under the for- 

11 



PREFACE 

mative action of cause an effect, action 
and reaction, impulse and motive; while 
throughout its entire fabric runs the direct- 
ing or supporting lines of principles, guag- 
ing its advance, unifying its expression and 
unfolding its purpose. 

This gives to man^s place in nature at once 
its reality and its mystery. His relation to 
the universe becomes freighted with the 
gravest and most far-reaching importance. 
He becomes a subject of cosmic dominion, 
yielding with equal felicity to the scalpel of 
concrete dissective science, and the abstract 
measurements of intangible metaphysics. 
The solution to the human equation is no 
longer to be worked out on one plane, but 
on all planes. 

From a close study of human motives in 
their relations to the conflict between the 
needs of man and the supply of nature, 
between the appetite of the senses and the 
recoil of their gratification — we will learn 
to decipher the signboards of evolution, 
and become more able to adjust our means 
of time to the ends of Destiny. The temp- 
tations that swerve us in our attitude to 
diet, and cause our failure to rationally 
relate means to ends, enjoyment to purpose, 
etc., are at present confronting the indi- 

12 



PREFACE 

vidual with an intensity that in many cases 
threaten him with extinction. And |the 
agent which today exerts the greatest in- 
fluence on our sense-hfe in relation to food 
is sugar. The dominating ingredient in most 
of our dishes, sugar perverts our taste, 
bhnds our instincts, bewilders our gastric 
consciousness, and leaves us guidelessly and 
aimlessly adrift in the rapids and breakers 
of morbid and despotic cravings, not in- 
frequently decoying the individual into 
body-and-mind-destroying excesses . 

In the book before you a bold attempt 
has been made to explain the w^eird power 
which sugar holds over the taste of the 
highest advanced culture-folk of the world 
today. At the same time it will convey 
a knowledge of the principle which trans- 
lates into terms of moral temptations, on 
the plane of the mind, the ''sweetness" 
or attractiveness which, as sugar, it exerts 
on our body through the sensation of taste. 

The reader will also learn that our atti- 
tude to sugar, as an element of food, will 
react with positive force on our moral na- 
ture in the construction of character. The 
Master was right: ''What ye bind on Earth, 
will be bound in Heaven.'' In our daily 
routine existence, as we relate ourselves to 
current events, we are offered the key of 



13 



PREFACE 

St. Peter, with the power to unlock the moral 
and intellectual treasures of man's highest 
nature. 

And furthermore, as it is not in the uses 
of sugar, but in its misuse and abuse that we 
evoke the Nemesis of nutritional disaster, 
so on the moral plane, we will find that as 
long as passion remains our servant, and 
under the control of our judgment, it will 
act as a lever of incalculable mental and 
moral force in the building up of will power 
and character. 

As with sugar so with salt. The rela- 
tion of the latter to the moral life and des- 
tiny of man, is no less significant than the 
former. Both stand for principles adherent 
in the deepest springs of human nature. 
In salt, we have the mystic ^^Rock of Ages,'' 
the ''Elixir of Life," and the ''Philosopher's 
Stone," all in one. But its nature, like 
the Sphinx, is double-faced; it relates us 
both to life and death; to health and dis- 
ease. It may set free by evaporation, or 
imprison by crystalization. From the stand- 
point of principle, it may give to our charac- 
ter the stability of the "Salt of the Earth," 
or crystalize our intellectual life into the 
rock-salt pillar of the symbolic wife of Lot. 

Sugar and salt are the symbols of man's 
dual nature, the balancing forces of his vast, 

14 



PREFACE 

complex evolution. As servants they raise 
him in the scale of life and power; as mas- 
ters they destroy him. 

^^At the gate of every Eden/' said Mo- 
hammed, ^ 'hangs a two-edged sword." In 
the Eden of Health, this sword is represented 
by the duality of Sugar and Salt. 



15 



SUGAR AND SALT- 
FOODS, OR POISONS? 
By 

Dr. Axel Emil Gibson 

CHAPTER I 

HAS THE POPULARITY OF SUGAR A 
SCIENTIFIC BASIS? 

Without possessing the fatal fascination 
of a narcotic, sugar exerts a greater at- 
traction on the human race than any other 
element of the dietary; and strange as it 
may appear, there exists a positive relation 
between a people's demand for sugar and 
the standard of its culture. 

Thus we find the Anglo-Saxon race to be 
the greatest of the world's sugar-eaters. 
In the statistics of the United States Govern- 
ment, collected in the year of 1910, we 
find that the average citizen of this country 
and Great Britain consumes yearly more 
than half his own weight, or 80 lbs. per 
capita. Next in the line of sugar-loving 
culture-people come Denmark, Sweeden and 
Norway, with their respective 70 and 65 

17 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

lbs. per average man, woman and child. 
Then follow Germany, France and Holland, 
with their tribute to the Monarch of Taste, 
at the rate of some 50 lbs. each, while at 
the end of the list we find Italy, Greece 
and Turkey with a sugar consumption of 
somewhat less than 23 lbs. per head. Last 
year's consumption of sugar in the United 
States alone exceeded 7000 million pounds. 

This universal popularity of sugar, es- 
pecially among nations where the tide of 
culture touches its high-water mark, has 
its cause and explanation in the readiness 
by which it gives off a maximum of energy 
with a minimum of digestive labor. The 
tension of modern life with its prodigious 
expenditure of muscular and nervous en- 
ergy demands a quick combustible to fa- 
cilitate rapid metabolic exchanges. Such 
a combustible, or ever-ready generator of 
muscular and nervous energy is found in 
sugar. Suspended in its bosom is held stor- 
age batteries of incalculable power, ready 
to be discharged in response to physiological 
needs and necessities. But the relation 
between the demand and the supply, in 
order to produce nutritionally safe results, 
must be metabolically balanced, and pro- 
ceed in accordance with physiological and 
biological principles. Through the culinary 

18 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

excesses in modern living we have ruptured 
the chain of vital reciprocity by which 
Mother Nature relates herself to,; the enti- 
ties of universal evolution. The ingenuity 
of the human intellect, stimulated by a self- 
ish desire to gratify an undue and unnatural 
craving for extracted and concentrated 
relishes, has devised expediences by which 
nature can be ^^held up" so to speak, and 
coerced to yield gustatory sensations in ex- 
cess of the powers of digestion and assim- 
ilation. One of the strongest, and at the 
same time most serious temptations in the 
life of an individual lies in his natural but 
over-indulged and hence overgrown desire 
for ^'sweets," not only on the physical plane, 
but as a mental attitude, on all planes. 

This craving for ^ ^sweets," experienced 
more or less by every creature of evolution, 
has a deep meaning in its relation to the 
unfolding and maintenance of life and growth. 
The function of sugar in evolution is unique 
and fundamental, having for its purpose to 
re-charge the cells of every entity with the 
vital force of structurel rejuvenescense. In- 
troduced into the system in its natural, vege- 
tative combinations, it starts chemical reac- 
tions in the responsive physiological functions, 
from which arise those cellular, unorganized 
vital enzymes, or ferments, which form the 

19 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

basic elements in all successful digestion 
and nutrition. 

It is thus readily seen why the creatures 
of evolution should worship at the shrine 
of this powerful, nutritional, stimulant. . . 
The engines of life — the innumerable cells 
of the organism — are kept in action through 
the combustion of the sugar molecule. The 
energy liberated from the breaking up of 
this persuasive element is instrumental in 
rising the whole organic world into levels 
of progressive unfoldment of power and 
substance. It constitutes the Atlas of a 
biologic Cosmos, maintaining the nutritional 
and physiological balance of organized ex- 
istence. 



> 



20 



CHAPTER II 



SUGAR AS AN EXTRACT, AND SUGAR 
AS A NATURAL PRODUCT 



The fact that no natural sugar occurs 
without being atomically balanced by carbon, 
leads us to the conclusion that its com- 
position, the formula of which is C6, H12, 
06, is an atomic or ionic charge of H. 0., 
held in chemical sequence by the carbon 
envelope. Brought in touch with organiza- 
tions that demand sugar for their growth 
and sustenance, the affinity evolved through 
the interaction of the different elements, 
may rise to an intensity overcoming the 
controlling power held by carbon over its 
compound. This transit of the sugar mole- 
cule from its carbonic envelope to the tro- 
phic cell of an organism, under the process 
of affinity, constitutes the basic principle 
and governing conditions in the entire chem- 
istry of nutrition. In other words, chemical 
affinity, in its action on the digestive and 
assimilative processes, brings out the prin- 
ciple of supply and demand in the field 
of physiological economy: hence the physiolo- 
gical value of sugar depends on the character 

21 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

of its origin — whether naturally or arti- 
ficially obtained. With natural sugars we 
mean the sweets prevailing in nature, as 
fruit and vegetable, before they have become 
subject to the processes of extraction and 
concentration demanded by the jaded sen- 
sibility of an over-stimulated and hyper- 
trophied appetite. 

At the head of the natural sugars stands 
Grape-sugar, or Dextrine, introduced by its 
carbon carrier in the form of a saturation- 
compound, and appearing as a complete 
molecule under the chemical formula C6, 
H12, 06. By this is indicated that Dex- 
trose stands for a complete, integral, per- 
manently self-sustained compound, in which 
Carbon, with its four valencies, or powers 
of affinity, redoubled or reinforced six times, 
is adequate to hold in a firm grip the single 
unit-power of the Hydrogen molecule — 
doubled 12 times, and the two-armed power 
of oxygen — doubled 6 times. Or, in other 
words, the valency or power of affinity of 
carbon amounts in power to the combined 
valencies of Hydrogen and Oxygen — viz: 

Oxygen, 2x 6 — 12 

Hydrogen, 1x12—12...... 24 

Carbon, 4x 6—24 24 

The formula governing this compound 
comprises the whole group of natural sugars, 

22 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

such as Grape-sugar, Fruit-sugar, and other 
Monosaccharides. Complete, and chemically 
satisfied with every atom of the compound 
structurally engaged, the formula C6, H12, 
06, introduces nature's own method of sup- 
plying her creatures with energy adequate 
to meet the needs and conditions of a com- 
plex evolution. Hence the congenial and 
energizing influence of fruit, vegetables, milk 
and honey upon the system, having the 
power to combine taste with virtue, impulse 
with permanence, and stimulation with 
normal growth. 



23 



CHAPTER III 

THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE OF 
SUGAR 

In its natural condition, as vegetable and 
fruit, sugar performs the supremely vital 
and constructive function in the physio- 
logical economy of the body, to acidify 
and subsequently to dissolve the slowly 
accruing crystalizations of waste-deposits in 
the capillaries. The modus operandus, by 
which this process is accomplished, is at 
once supremely grand and supremely simple. 
When, in the course of excessive feeding, 
the capillaries and lymph-spaces become 
clogged up with crystalizations of accumulated 
urates, oxalates, carbonates, ammonia, etc., 
the system, by an ingenious process of sdf- 
governing adjustment, has the power to 
change the normal alkalinity of the circula- 
tion into a temporary condition of acidity, 
so as to be able to dissolve the constantly 
increasing blockade of toxines in the vas- 
cular exchange. This change is affected by 
the natural, unorganized — i. e. non-bacterial 
— acids imparted into the system by fruit. 
For the sugar of the fruity when assimi- 

24 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

lated by the system, gives rise to normal 
fermentative processes resulting in the for- 
mation of the above acids, whose useful- 
ness to the system consists in dissolving 
crystalized waste matter. On the other 
hand, the magnesium, potassium, sodium 
and other organic tissue salts contained in 
the fruits, have the power to engender a 
return of the acidified blood back into its 
normal state of alkalinity. Thus Nature 
wields, in one single hand, the knife of the 
surgeon and the balm of the nurse — the dis- 
solving fires of the acids and the restorative 
alkalinity of the salts. 

The acidulation of the natural sugars in 
the system is attended by physiological emer- 
gencies. The greater percentage is turned 
into fat and energy. Acid depletes — exca- 
vates. Sugar repletes — renovates. Acid, by 
its chemical fire, reduces organized waste- 
products and tissue-poisons into ashes; sugar, 
by its chemical affinity for organized poisons, 
absorbs the pathological wreckage thrown 
into circulation, and removes the blockade 
from the ducts and channels. Acids lower 
the temperature of the system, by dis- 
solving the decayed and fermenting substances 
held suspended in the various tissues; sugar 
restores the normal degree of temperature' 
by virtue of its chemical affinity for the 

25 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

liberated poisons — extracting and conducting 
them out of the system. 

So far, so good; but while the power of 
Nature to maintain the w^orking standard 
of constitutional health has its seat and 
condition in a normal balancing in the 
system of salts and sugars, obtained from 
the fruits and vegetables — in order to meet 
the exigencies of obvese environments and 
abnormal situations — nature, in her ever- 
present resourcefulness, often takes recourse 
to abnormal means. Thus, in the great 
vital economy of existence, what may stand 
for unhygienic and illogical food combina- 
tions under one set of conditions, may, 
under the stress of reversed conditions, be- 
come the very means necessary to restore 
a disturbed physiological balance. We may 
therefore find that in the countries of the 
North, where fruits are scarce, or absent, 
a moderate indulgence in extracted sweets, 
are not only physiologically tolerable, but 
may be necessary. Jellies, jams, and fruit- 
preserves, in themselves mere dead and em- 
blamed fruits, nevertheless, under certain 
conditions are valuable agencies of muscular 
and nervous energy. To the extent, how- 
ever, that nature is adequate to supply our 
dietary directly from her own faultless cuisine, 
where the sun does the cooking and the 

26 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

earth the seasoning, any procedure to stim- 
ulate taste and appetite by artificial mix- 
tures will only result in invoking the Nemesis 
of a disordered stomach and liver. Only 
in regions where nature is barren, and fails 
to meet the demand of our system for a 
balanced nutrition, are we justified in pre- 
paring, artificially, the required food-supply. 



27 



CHAPTER IV 

THE MAGIC OF A CHEMICAL 
FORMULA 

The enormous difference between sugar as 
a health-promoting, and sugar as a health- 
destroying power, is represented in the dis- 
placement of a single figure in its chemical 
formula. In chemistry, if anywhere, figures 
do not lie. The formula back of the whole 
series of artificial or extracted sugars — CI 2, 
H22, Oil — shows at once that its compound 
is spurious and not in a position to supply the 
system with its congenial, normally-adequate 
needs of energy. A dissection of the formula 
reveals its inadequate and unbalanced 
structure. 

Hydrogen, 1x22—22 

Oxygen, 2x11—22.... ...44 



Carbon, 4x12—48 48 

which means a balance of unsatisfied affini- 
ties amounting to -4. 

Thus we see how, in this spurious compound, 
carbon enters the field of physiological chem- 
istry with two unsatisfied valencies for Oxygen, 

28 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

which means that the digestive system has 
to fill the ensuing elemental vacancies with 
its own supply of Oxygen. That is to say, 
that artificial sugar comes into the system 
with a demand in place of a supply, and 
with its unsatisfied affinities threatening the 
solidarity of every tissue, subject to its power. 
Under the category of artificial sugars we 
comprise cane-sugar, malt-sugar, milk-sugar 
and the various forms of disaccharides in 
extracted fluids or crystals. Indulged in 
as means of increasing the flavor of foodstuffs, 
in themselves complete, such as cereals, 
vegetables and ripe fruit, this artificial form 
of sugar proceeds to re-establish its ruptured 
chemical balance at the expense of the 
body^s own nutritional storages. Sooner or 
later this brings the system into a state of 
general functional and structural bankruptcy. 



29 



CHAPTER V 

THE DESTRUCTIVE PHASE OF SUGAR 

An analysis of the natural and extracted 
sugars shows unmistakably the dangerous 
character of the latter, when used indis- 
criminately in the preparation of foods: 

Natural Artificial 

Sugar Sugar 

Potassium 30 .19 28 . 79 

Sodium___ 10 .42 2 . 89 

Calcium Carb. 2.60 10.93 

Magnesium..... 4.71 1.16 

Iron. 3.23 1.68 

Sulphur 4.85 4.69 

Water 44.00 



100.00% 50.14% 

Now it is in this mutilated form that 
sugar works its ravages in the human nu- 
trition. Subjected to the processes of diges- 
tion and assimilation, it forms a nutritional 
vacuum in the system by which is generated 
a protracted suction or urge towards a restor- 
ation of its disturbed elemental balance; a 
suction, which, like a thousand-armed octopus, 
extends its fibres to every center of the 

30 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

organism. As it is Potassium and Sodium 
that^ are especially subjected to the raving 
affinities of the extracted sugar, it is in the 
attack on these highly important tissue-salts 
that the deadliest blows are dealt to health 
and life. And, furthermore, as the function 
of these salts is to drain and clean the tissues 
of poisonous substances, their absorption 
by the chemical action of the sugar means a 
retention of the carbonic, lactic, oxalic, uric 
and other acids, and the subsequent forma- 
tion of obstructive deposits in the tissues 
and capillaries. This again means high blood- 
pressure, with cellular asphyxia and auto- 
intoxication, which if continued must, in 
the course of time, give rise to permanent 
functional disorders of liver, kidneys and 
lungs. Furthermore, as retarded circulation 
and subsequent incomplete oxygenation of 
tissue-wastes generates adipose or fatty tissue 
in the body, it is readily seen how the in- 
dulgence in free sugars can give rise to fat, 
and why fat is a very unreliable sign of 
health. It is only a question of time when 
adipose tissue, if continued to be formed, 
will terminate in Adiposis, or fatty degeren- 
ation. 



31 



CHAPTER V 

EXCESS IN FOOD — FAILURE IN 
NUTRITION 



In the geat economy of nature, with its 
ever-present adjustment of supply to demand, 
of gratification to need, etc., we find all along 
the highway of evolution the presence of 
certain guide boards or danger signals, re- 
minding the individual of the perils which 
lie in wait for the trespassers. 

It is there curring verificationon a universal 
scale of the statement of the great Moham- 
medan Prophet, that at the gate of every 
Eden swings the two-edged sword of life 
and death. 

It is the sword of moral balance, suspended 
over the alluring field of gratification and 
excess, for were it not for this corrective 
of suffering, following upon the heels of 
excess, the creatures on the stage of evolution 
would long ago have been blotted out of 
existence through self-destruction. It is only 
through the unerring and unrelenting re- 
adjustment, unfolding along the chain of 
guilt and punishment, that an overwhelming 

32 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

percentage of humanity is kept from ex- 
tinction. 

Excess strikes the Hmit of the evolutionary 
scale of balance. Whether this excess has 
its balance in sugar or salt, in carbon or 
nitrogen, in acids or starches, its course is 
Hnked with sensuous gratification on a basis 
of personal egotism, and followed by the 
inevitable train of vital exhausture and sys- 
temic breakdown, — a breakdown which has 
its closing event in some or other phase of 
functional arrest, indicated by a gradual hard- 
ening of the tissues of the organism. Thus 
arise the more or less grave ailments known 
as Arterio-Sclerosis, Induration of the Liver, 
Arthrodial Rheumatism, Interstitial Nephri- 
tis, Cardiac Ossification, etc., which all stand 
as immutable state-evidences in the court of 
physiological equity, testifying to inroads in 
the field of self-indulgences and excess. With 
all the differences inherent in the various 
forms of dietetic transgression, both as to 
principle and process, in this final phase of 
nutritional excess, they all join issue: — the 
reaction from over-stimulation into condi- 
tions of functional arrest, and the subse- 
quent breakdown, from congestion of the 
tissues and viscera, into their crystalization. 
Under specific conditions, however, when its 
consumption is gauged by a biological and 

33 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

nutritional balance, sugar may rise the cel- 
lular activities of the system in to the highest 
standards of efficiency. Its swiftness of com- 
bustion and readiness to generate nerve- 
power, swells the tides of the vital currents 
in the organism, into ever higher levels of 
functional efficiency and structural endur- 
ance. 



FOOT NOTE.— This law holds good on all planes— in mental 
not less than elemental nature. It maintains with unfailing 
safety the physical, mental and moral balance of the universe. 
From the dispersion of a thunderstorm to the breaking up of a 
fever; from the neutralization of a chemical eruption to the 
assuaging of a raging passion, this same principle holds good — 
the neutraUzation of a movement by the progeny of its own 
convulsions. In other words, the unemployed excess of energy, 
generated by an unleashed and uncontrolled nature-force, 
seeks in the formation of a new center or nucleus a fresh field 
for its activity, while, parasite-hke, it proceeds to feed upon 
its own parent substance. 

In the breaking up of organic crystalizations, by converting 
the system from a normal state of alkahnity into a critical 
state of acidity, this same law is at work, balancing up the 
debit and credit columns of physiological economy. It repre- 
sents the principle of self-adjusting intelligence, inherent in 
every atom of the universe, from the system of man to the system 
of suns — converting waste products of excess into means and 
methods of order, harmony and growth. 



34 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EXCESS AND 

BALANCE 

In its relation to sugar, the philosophy 
of excess and balance unfolds one of the most 
profound schemes ever manifested in the 
evolution of life. At once a depressant and 
a stimulant, a check and a motor, sugar, 
by its quality of effecting instantaneous 
chemical changes from alkalinity into acidity, 
has the power to dissolve the organic crystal- 
izations of nutritional wastes, which have 
been formed through excess, and stored up 
in the muscles and capillaries of the system. 
At a given moment, when under the strain 
of a constantly increasing avalanche of cry- 
stalizations, which threaten to break through 
the walls of the capillaries, the vascular 
strain reaches its limits of endurance, the 
blood, by the magic of true alchemy, changes 
its nature from normal alkalinity to tem- 
porary acidity. By this wonderful expe- 
diency, nature saves the situation, and re- 
stores the physiological balance to the system. 
The power of natural acids to dissolve the 
uric and carbonic crystalizations, lodged in 

35 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

the muscles and capillaries, sets free the 
circulation from its deadly octopus, and 
the chemical constitution of the blood re- 
turns to its normal alkalinity. 

FOOT NOTE. — It is through the action of natural sugar 
that the blood has the power to affect this marvelous piece of 
chemistry. Nor do these changes take place in the human 
body alone; they occur in the field of general vegetation as well. 
Back of all acidity we find the formula, C6H1206, which is 
also the index on natural sugar. The flavor of the fruit pre- 
vails in sweetness or acidity, just to the extent its sugar is con- 
verted into acid, or its acid converted into sugar. Thus, in 
the lemon we find the entire biologic contents of the tree con- 
verted into acid, while on the other hand, in the pear, the acid 
is held in abeyance, the sugar alone occupying the field. Again 
in the apple, prune and cherry, the elemental transmutation 
has affected an intermediary balance. Sugar and acid are the 
two interchanging phases or poles of biogenic unfoldment, 
springing out from the vast, slumbering storehouse of starch, 
which in its turn has its birth in the womb of carbon. For in 
carbon we have the great archaic matrix, or repository, in 
which the whole organized zone of Ufe has its seat and center of 
unfoldment. The steps of organic ascent of life can thus readily 
be verified. Out from the carbon, on the threshold of the in- 
organic, unawakened world, arises the vegetable kingdom, 
unfolding and organizing its biological properties in a zone of 
starch. In the latter is formed the volatile compound of sugar ; 
while out of sugar, like a purging, refining, regenerating spirit, 
is born the acid. 



36 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ORGAN- 
IZED AND UNORGANIZED ACIDS, 
AND THEIR RELATION TO RHEU- 
MATISM. 

Taken in its natural form as fruit or vege- 
table, sugar performs the function of a 
nutritional balance, promptly removing, by 
its strong affinities, any hardening or crystal- 
ization of tissue arising from errors and 
excesses in the human dietary. But if in 
disregard of Nature's plain indications, sugar 
is consumed in its artificial form, as the ex- 
tracts or compounds of commerce, the pro- 
cess becomes altogether different. As the 
system of nutrition has no way of employing 
in its economy this extra, uncalled for, and 
consequently unused supply of sugar, the 
latter becomes a vagrant and a hindrance to 
the sweep of the vital energies that keep 
the metabolic exchanges of the system in 
balance and order. And it is here, in the 
nutritional disturbance thus given rise to, 
we find the cradle for that long chain of 
morbid progeny which forms the ghostly 

37 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

procession of the constantly increasing num- 
ber of modern ailments. Foremost in this 
procession, we have congestion, catarrh and 
rheumatism. This is a phase of physiolo- 
gical chemistry which is of greatest impor- 
tance to the student of human nutrition. 
The chemical action at work, transforming 
natural sugar into natural acids of the liv- 
ing fruit, differs fundamentally and essenti- 
ally from the chemistry by which artificial 
or extracted sugars are changed into 
the organized acids of bacterial fermenta- 
tion in the system. For the latter process 
involves the action of what is called ^^or- 
ganized enzymes/' by which is meant that 
the ensuing fermentation is due to the pre- 
sence of bacteria feeding on the artificial 
sugar circulating in the system, — a process 
which gives rise to the pathologic phase 
of acidity recognized in the various forms 
of indigestion, dyspepsia and general acidity 
of the system. In place of acting as a sol- 
vent on the crystalizations deposited in the 
body tissues of the organism, these acids 
add directly to the morbid processes already 
present. 

This accounts for the common belief that 
^ 'acids" give rise to rheumatism and further- 
more, as fruit is regarded as the general 
source of the acids, the first advice of the 

38 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

old time doctor in a case of rheumatism is to 
eliminate this wholesome article from the 
dietary. The significance of this dietetic 
mistake is more readily appreciated when 
we realize that not only do the fruit-acids 
act as a solvent on the crystalized waste 
products, but the natural sugar contained 
in the fruit, by transforming itself into acid, 
aids the elimination, and thus lays bare to 
us the very heart of the fruit-and acid de- 
lusion. It is the atrificial sugars, the ex- 
tractea and concentratea ''sweets'' of the 
preserves, the syrups or candies of commerce, 
converted by an unsuccessful digestion into 
the organized acids of bacteral fermenta- 
tion, that give rise to rheumatism;— not the 
wholesome sweets and acids, contained in 
the natural fresh fruit. 



39 



CHAPTER IX. 
THE PERIL OF ^TREE SWEETS." 

It is doubtful whether any extractions 
or extortions from the storages of elemental 
nature have brought the transgressor to 
more disastrous ends than the consump- 
tion of what has been termed ''free sweets." 

Now by ''free sweets" is meant the sach- 
aride substance extracted by mechanical 
or chemical means from sugar-bearing trees 
and plants, at the expense of the vital poise 
physiological balance of the fruit as the 
latter, transmitted as food into the system 
of nutrition, goes to build up the animal 
and human organism. 

Suspended as a vital ingredient in the 
product, and balanced in its nutritional 
action by other elements, present in the plant, 
grain and fruit, such as the fats, starches 
and acid, — sugar becomes the indespensible 
source to the fat, heat and energy necessary 
to the normal functioning of the body; 
while on the other hand, in the form of 
concentrated and isolated extracts, the action 
of sugar becomes the very opposite: a vio- 

40 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

lent combustible, destructive in place of 
constructive. In other words, — per- 
mitted to form an integral, undisturbed 
part of its fruit or vegetable origin, sugar 
represents the safe and practical house- 
hold fuel, perfectly under control, and well 
suited for its purpose; while when extracted 
or concentrated, its nature becomes changed 
into a dangerous explosive,beyond the power of 
control, and unfolding in a train of ever 
threatening accidents. 

Now it is this readiness of sugar to yield 
physiological combustion, that accounts for 
its immense importance in the process of 
digestion, oxygenation and assimilation. Its 
strong affinity for Carbon,Uric and Oxalic acids 
and other waste poisons of the bod}^, equips 
it with power to break up the toxic compound 
of the latter, and thus to set free and cause 
to be eliminated the compounds of these 
tissue poisons. Carried by the blood stream 
to the lungs, its swift oxygenation renders 
the entire mass of chyle porous to the purg- 
ing and vitalizing action of oxygen Hence 
in its normal combination sugar constitutes 
the ever stirring, impelling energy in the 
vegetable world, pushing the molecular com- 
pounds of the latter into processes of in- 
cessant combustion and constitutional re- 
construction. 



41 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

But on the other hand, if sugar is intro- 
duced into the system as an extractive, and 
consequently in excess of nutritional needs, 
its very readiness to absorb oxygen causes 
it to monopolize the latter, almost to the 
exclusion of the rest of the chyle, thereby 
preventing the circulating proteids from com- 
ing in touch with the pulmonary ignition. 
A physiological combustible, sugar, when sus- 
pended in the blood stream, explodes at 
the first touch of the igniting oxygen, and 
if present in excess, will prevent the heavier 
less ignitious, nitrogenous material of the 
blood from becoming oxygenated. This '^ad- 
vanced ignition' ' so to speak, with its natural 
consequence of leaving the starch and pro- 
teid substances only partially oxygenated, 
will sooner or later, lead the system into 
grave nutritional disorders. For as the ex- 
posure of the swift moving blood-stream to 
the air current, sweeping through the 
lungs, is only momentry, it follows that the 
chyle,in place of being oxygenated and trans- 
formed into nourishing, regenerated blood, 
is turned into a devitalizing, degenerating 
poison, starting processes of decomposi- 
tion and decay in the body tissues. The 
pathological accretions thus arising gradually 
calcify into forms of rheumatism, gout, catarrh 
etc., wherever the curves and windings of 

42 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

the venous and arterial passages of the body 
impede the flow of the blood stream and it 
generating action. 

The more direct and immediate effect 
on the digestion due to an excessive consump- 
tion of the ^'free" or extracted sugar, is 
experienced in the ^^sour stomach", belching 
of gas and general dyspeptic disorders, etc., 
and refers to an action similar to that al- 
ready described in the relation of sugar to 
the lungs. Its readiness to combine with 
oxygen breaks up the hydrochloric acid mole- 
cule in the stomach and thus precludes the 
proteid foods from being acted upon by the 
gastric juice. Suspended in a temperature 
of some 97^ and bathed in alkaline- 
pepsin (non-disinfectant ) secretions, the food, 
after a longer or shorter exposure, is passing 
into partial or complete decomposition, ac- 
cording to the constitutional strength of. 
the individuals' digestive power to counter- 
act the ensuing morbid conditions. If the 
the dietetic transgressions are continued, the 
final result of bacterial invasion auto-poison- 
ing and organic breakdown — becomes in- 
evitable. 

In its action on the physiology of nutri- 
tion, ''free sugar'' gives rise to other dis- 
orders in the system. Suspended in the 
blood-stream, it exerts a similar influence 

43 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

on the iron, contained in the latter, as on the 
iron active in the chemistry of the soil. 
According to Prof. E. T. Wright, author 
of 'Tlant Disease" (London, 1903), it has 
been proved by analysis that an unstable 
quantity of iron is extracted from the soil 
in every crop of cane sugar, which, in the 
course of a few years cultivation, results in 
the total withdrawal from the soil of its 
entire iron supply. 

Now as the iron percentage of sugar is 
greatly reduced through its processes of 
extraction and concentration, it follows that 
the first engagement of the sugar molecule, 
upon entering the system, is to replenish 
its own vacuum, i. e,, its diminished balance 
of iron, by a direct chemical absorption of 
this element from the blood. 

And furthermore as iron constitutes the 
balancing lever between inspired oxygen and 
expired carbonic acid gas in the processes 
of breathing, it follows that the departure 
of the iron molecule from the blood cor- 
puscle means a retention of the carbonic 
acid gas in the tissues, with the subsequent 
poisoning of the various organs and viscera 
of the entire system. The numerous cases 
of anemia, myopia, and nasal catarrh, which 
occur almost like an epidemic among our 
candy-devouring school-children, are certain- 

44 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

ly strong indications of the ravages wrought 
on the system by the excessive indulgence 
in free sugar. 



45 



CHAPTER X. 

THE PLACE OF SUGAR IN THE 
HYGIENIC BILL-OF-FARE 

On the basis of the foregoing, it becomes 
easier to reahze the true charatcer and value 
of sugar as a product of extraction. As a 
quickly assimilable substance, sugar may even 
in its extracted form be a valuable source 
of energy for the system. Wisely combined, 
or better still, not combined at all, sugar is 
more readily converted into heat, fat and 
energy, than any other known food stuff. 
Taken in its natural, unextracted form, such 
as carrot, beet, turnip, etc., it enters by two 
steps the field of absorption. Conversion 
into dextrine, through salivation, and into 
dextrose, through intestinal digestion. This 
makes it ready for systemic absorption and 
utilization in terms of energy, heat and fat ; — 
the latter however involving further and 
more complex processes in the chemistry of 
nutrition. Sugar is an evolution of starch 
in the vegetable kingdom, and from acids 
in the kingdom of fruits. Hence a piece 
of free sugar, whether extracted in the human 
stomach, from a baked potato, a corn muffin, 

46 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

or a carrot; or extracted in a sugar factory 
from the sugar cane or beet — involves prin- 
cipally the same processes: the dextrini- 
zation of starch into sugar. 

So far, so good. The system accepts 
the output of the sugar factory with appar- 
ently the same readiness and utility as the 
output of her own gastric industry. A lump 
of sugar from one of the Jamaica cane sugar 
refineries, is converted into heat and mus- 
cular energy with the same practical result, 
and followed by the same stimulation of 
the system, as a measure of glycogen 
poured by the liver into the stream of nutri- 
tion. The diffierence is not so much to be 
found in the facts of its manufacture, as in 
the facts of its combination with other food- 
stuffs of the daily diet. 

Hence a stick of pure candy, or a lump 
of plain sugar— if enjoyed at a time when 
theistomachl is empty, and no fermentation 
of other foods possible, may not only 
be harmless to the normal and healthy 
stomach, but even be of great value in mom- 
ents of exhausture, owing to its quickly 
available sources of energy. The same may 
be said as to the enjoyment of ice-cream. 
If pure, and taken when the stomach is empty, 
ice-cream may be a most congenial and 
effective form of light nourishment to the 

47 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

healthy and nerve-strong, — at once cooling 
and refreshing to the blood, and stimulating 
to the nerves and muscles. 

But this advantage is entirely lost the 
moment, when in one form or another, 
we use sweets as the major ingredient in 
elaborate food mixtures, or at the end of 
a dinner when the stomach is already over- 
taxed and in the stress of a laborious diges- 
tion. The unavoidable fermentation, due 
to the action of the sugar on the incongru- 
ous mass, will subvert the gastric process 
from a field of digestion into a field of de- 
composition. And here is where the force 
of motive, as applied to diet, has a life-and- 
death wielding significance. For the ques- 
tion which in this relation is all important 
lies in its ruling motive, whether we employ 
sweets as a means of strength and utility, 
or merely for the gratification of an abnor- 
mal, uncontrolled, purposeless and reason- 
less craving for sweets, mostly to the menace 
of health, strength and usefulness. 

To be safe in employing free sugar as a 
means of food, another fact must be consid- 
ered — the fact of quantity — excess. Even 
if the combinations are guarded, the intro- 
duction into the system of more sugar than 
the system can assimilate, means eventual 
physiological disaster. If cane sugar is not 

48 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

assimilated,) and when used to excess, 
assimilation must always be faulty) it passes 
unchanged through the kidneys and remains 
in the system as a poison. The compli- 
cations arising from such a course of malnutri- 
tion, not only requires an extra amount of work 
by the system but demands the vitally ex- 
haustive secretions of certain '^defensive fer- 
ments," to serve as a ^^body guard" for the 
isolation and deportation of poisons afloat 
in the circulation. Hence so far from being 
a source or means of energy, sugar under 
such conditions, becomes a factor of decay 
and degeneracy. On the other hand the 
degree of digestibility of pure sugar when 
consumed in moderate quantities, and guard- 
ed from admixtures with other food stuffs, 
especially starches and proteids, is very great 
— amounting in the healthy stomach to over 
90 per cent. However it must be recogniz- 
ed, that it is this high nutritional percent- 
age of the sugar that renders its admixture 
with nitrogeneous substances dangerous, as 
the readiness of the sugar to be assimilated 
retards the assimilation of the heavier pro- 
teids, such as beans, peas, meats, lentils, 
etc., which in consequence are retained in 
the system — unused and unusable — to be 
treated and disposed of as poisonous waste. 

Guided by these facts, we are more 

49 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

capable of determining the true position 
of sugar, both as to quahty and quan- 
tity, in our daily diet. Its power to retard 
and even to arrest the digestion of proteids 
and starches, should give us a reliable clue, 
as to conditions, making sugar a safe and 
healthful part of our foodstuffs. Its work 
in the body is to release muscular energy, 
and to give explosive force to functional 
levers. It is this character of being a mere 
extract that renders sugar incapable 
in any direct way of mending a single muscle. 
On the contrary, if used in excess, it may 
not only burn up the muscle by the very 
explosiveness of its liberated energy, but 
even cause to be retarded the assimilation 
of the very substances, the proteids, whose 
function is to generate and repair mus- 
cular tissue. 



FOOT NOTE. — The employment of sugar in the preservation 
or seasoning of fruit has a logical and hygienic basis in the fact 
that sugar is a natural ingredient in fruit, being one of its main 
and vitally indispensible elements. With perhaps the exception 
of the lemon, all full-grown and perfectly ripe fruits are sweet 
and congenial, both to the palate and to the gastric juice. When 
on the other hand, the fruit has had an incomplete ripening 
owing to insufficient exposure to the sun, or to excess of 
humidity in the air or soil, etc., or perhaps in most cases to a 
premature picking, its acidity has had neither the time nor 
conditions to accomplish its evolution into a natural sweetness. 
To avoid the corrosion which this unmodified acidity may have 
upon the fining of a sensitive stomach and intestine, it may be 
advisable to artificially incre9,se tjie sugar percentage of the 

50 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

fruit, preferably by cooking. This sweetening of the fruit 
tends to balance up its deficiency of sugar, and by a neutraliza- 
tion of Its acidity, bring about an arbitrary, though, under the 
circumstances, hygienically defensible ripening. 



51 



CHAPTER XI. 

SUGAR THE EXPLOSIVE FORCE IN 
THE HUMAN DYNAMO. 

From this, it is evident that though sugar 
is vitally important as a source of dynamic 
energy, its abuse or excess is wrought with 
mediate or immediate disaster. If, by way 
of illustration, a live wire is permitted to 
stand for a nerve, and the glow of the elec- 
tric lamp represent the phenomena of life, 
so the sugar in our simile, would occupy 
the position of the electric fluid, sweeping 
through the conduits of the nerve as a form 
of vital impulse. And furthermore, as the 
electric current in its discharges, so far from 
repairing and replacing the worn out wires, 
by its very nature becomes the cause of their 
breakdown, so the sugar by its very charac- 
ter as force, in place of regenerating or re- 
pairing the engaged muscular tissue, is us- 
ing it up as an inevitable consequence of 
its activity. An excess of sugar in the diet 
must therefore, sooner or later lead to pre- 
mature physical weakness and breakdown. 

From this it naturally follows that the 
muscles first to suffer from the excess or 

52 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

force would be those on which the indivi- 
dual most depends in his specific work and 
vocation in life. Thus we find that the 
college students or school children, whose 
eye muscles are under a constant and con- 
centrated strain, if indulging excessively in 
sugar, are hable to suffer premature senility 
in their power of vision. The enforced ac- 
tion of the optic nerve with its response in 
the orbital muscles, demands for the repair 
of the latter a correspondingly increased 
supply of blood. Surcharged with sugar, 
however, the blood will become a field of 
combustion for vital batteries, which in 
place of building up the worn out muscles 
will hasten their breakdown. The increas- 
ing percentage of eye-glass wearing children 
in our public schools testifies abundantly 
to the sad havoc played by the excessive 
consumption of sugar, in young and old. 

Now on the other hand, if the percentage 
of sugar solution in the blood is below the 
normal, and the muscles in consequence 
receive insufficient supply of energy to form 
an adequate basis for the finer functioning 
of an evolutionally advancing nervous sys- 
tem, the latter for its maintenance requires 
an extra supply of sugar. One of the causes 
for an inadequate supply of sugar in the blood 
may be found in the hyperacidity of unripe 

53 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

fruit in which the acid, owing to its insuffi- 
cient sun exposure has failed to be conver- 
ted into sugar — a fact which gives to the 
sweetening of fruit a hygienic defense. Ow- 
ing to the insufficient Hght and heat of 
the sun to accompUsh a perfect ripening of 
the fruit, the incomplete saccharization of 
the latter demands a supply of sugar equal- 
izing the lacking percentage. The taste of 
the normal and healthy individual, if care- 
fully and self-masterly trained, may in most 
cases be dependable in determining the a- 
mount of sugar, needed to complete the 
sugar standard of any particular fruit. 

However, there can be no generalization 
with regard to standards of diet. Each 
individual must be prepared to work out 
his own standard of diet in accord with the 
dominent key of his constitutional peculiar- 
ities. Some people find in the fresh, ripe 
fruits and grains all that is required to sat- 
isfy their nutritions needs, while the consti 
tution of others make positive nutritional 
demands on the heavy proteids. 

As the geographical position of the coun- 
tries approach the tropical latitudes, where 
the fruit receives a complete ripening, the 
natural sweetness of the fruit requires no 
addition of sugar to become a perfect re- 
liable source of health, strength and effi- 

54 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

ciency. The factor of individual health and 
predisposition, however, must never be dis- 
regarded in matters of diet. The nervous- 
ly high-strung, and delicately organized in- 
dividual, must be especially care- 
ful in avoiding any excess in the employ- 
ment of sweets. A large percentage of ner- 
vousness, without doubt is due to the sur- 
plus of sugar in the diet of the sufferer 
which burns and explodes in the conduits 
of the nervous system. A prompt elimin- 
ation of sugar from their diet should be 
the first act toward the re-establishing of 
a proper balance between energy and sub- 
stratum; between the levers of muscle and 
the pressure of force in the system. 



55 



CHAPTER XII 

CAN SUGAR ALONE MAINTAIN THE 
EXPENDITURE OF MUSCULAR 
LABOR? 

In the laboratory experiments by Prof. 
Vaughan Harley, Dr. Alphonso Mosso and 
other investigators, it seems to have been 
brought beyond the reach of doubt that the 
muscular energy released by the consump- 
tion of sugar surpasses the effect of any 
other food stuff. Prof. Mosso, in his work 
at the Royal Laboratory of Physiological 
Research of Italy, has proved by a series 
of experiments that 3 or 4 ounces of sugar, 
taken an hour or so before 6 p. m. — the time 
for the cyclic oncoming of systemic fatigue 
and consequent need of rest, — has the power 
to practically recharge the force output of 
the entire organism. As if touched by magic 
the individual bounds into the possession 
of new energy, restoring his flagging mus- 
cles into a sense of undeminished vigor, 
without having to take recourse to any form 
of rest or relaxation, while continuing 
the work to the end of the experiment. 

Similar conclusions have been reached by 

56 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

Dr. Schumberg in his experimental work 
in Prof. Zuntz's laboratory in Berlin, Ger- 
many, in collaboration with Dr. Long- 
meyer and Prof. Stockvis, of Amsterdam. 
On a diet of 500 grams of sugar dissolved 
in water, a laborer was able to perform the 
same amount of daily work as if fed on an 
ordinary mixed flesh diet. Applied to the 
German Army, it was further demonstra- 
ted that the soldiers could endure expo- 
sures in marches and field maneuvers, other- 
wise unendurable, if some 70 grams (about 
l-6th of a pound of sugar were added to their 
daily rations. Taking every condition and 
exigency of the test into consideration, it 
stands as a positively ascertained fact, that 
sugar, at least during the length of time 
covered by the experiments, is capable of 
supplying the muscular expenditure of en- 
ergy involved in standardized physical work, 
without the assistance of a starch or pro- 
teid dietary. 

Instructive and interesting as these ex- 
periments are, they fail however to touch 
the real, vital points of the problem. So 
far, the whole series of experimentation has 
only reached surface results. Here as every- 
where, science has given way to theorizing, 
allowing generalizations to serve as stan- 
dards for permanent and enduring elemen- 

57 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

tary facts in human physiology. While the 
theoretical fact that 7.5 ounces of sugar 
dissolved in a pint of water can sustain the 
muscular strain and nervous expenditure 
involved in a day's physical labor, the ar- 
gument has failed to consider the extreme- 
ly important roll occupied by life itself in 
its organized expression. If man were a 
mere machine, his upkeep on standardized 
weights and measures would easily be made 
possible. But being a living, intelligent en- 
tity, individualized and poised to vital and 
mental impulses, his relation and response 
to fuel, as values of dietetics, must be meas- 
ured in terms of qualities rather than quan- 
tities. The generalization of individual 
standards of life has always remained the 
greatest foe to deeper and truer conception 
of the true needs and necessities of life. 

Foods have their vital values revealed 
not in the chemical retort of the laboratory 
in its base or acid reactions, but in 
their relation to the rythmic flow of indi- 
vidualized life. For after all, it is the rythmi- 
cal adjustment between the vital principles 
contained in the natural foods, and the 
specific receptivity of the cell-lives or cell- 
organisms of the system, that lies back of 
and gives destiny to the entire physiologi- 
cal or biologic being. The chemistry of 

58 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

the laboratory is a crude, hap-hazard pro- 
ceeding, compared with the chemistry of 
the cell-life. The essences or forces that 
fundamentally and essentially build up the 
body, are principles rather than elements; 
the effluvia or ionic discharges of foods; 
as vital force, rather than of foods as mole- 
cular structure. 

This brings us back to our original posi- 
tion with regard to sugar. As an extract 
the latter constitutes a mere means or method 
of expediency, toward the artificial improve- 
ment of fruits where a delinquent Nature 
under the strain and stress of contrary en- 
vironment, fails to ripen and mature. Con- 
sequently the addition of sugar to fruit is 
hygienically legitimate, only to the extent 
that climatic or environmental limitations 
have interrupted nature in bringing her 
creative labors to an ideal finish. Con- 
sequently it is only in regions where nature 
is thus handicapped, in the temperate and 
arctic zones, that cookery may be tolerated 
to round out and equalize natural defi- 
ciencies in the sugar percentage of the fruit. 
And while extractives, preserves and general 
admixtures of free sugar in food prepara- 
tions, have their values as expediencies in 
the economy of human nutrition, relative 
to imperfectly matured fruit, yet it must 

59 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

never be forgotten that it is only in sub- 
mitting to the weights and measures used 
by nature in the preparations of her articles 
of diet, that we find the true course to at- 
tain a higher and a highest standard of human 
efficiency, and that the closer we observe 
nature's elemental balance, the safer are our 
guarantees for a long and useful life. Only 
where Nature positively fails has man the 
right to step in with his artificial methods 
and attempt a completion of her foreshort- 
ened aims. 

But when this sweetening process is ex- 
tended to food-stuffs whose composition, 
complete by itself, makes no constitutional 
demand on an increased percentage of sweets 
such as starches, vegetables and cereals 
in their various forms of mushes and pastry, 
etc., the matter of sugaring our food-stuffs 
takes on an altogether different aspect. In 
this case, the science of nutrition can offer 
not a single logical argument in its favor. 
The direct and immediate objection lies 
in the fact that the digestion of sugar pro- 
ceeds at a far quicker rate than that of 
starches and proteids, and consequently, if 
taken in excess, will over balance the sys- 
temic demands for sugar and at the same 
time over tax the power of the liver to con- 
vert the mass of saccharides into glycogen. 

60 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

To save the liver from breakdown, nature 
is obliged to revert the method of her normal 
functional industry and to permit a larger 
or smaller percentage of the sugar to go 
nutritionally unchanged into the field of 
excretion — a delinquency that spells an un- 
usual taxation of the excretory organs, es- 
pecially the kidneys, and eventually follow- 
ed by their gradual weakening and collapse. 
Furthemore, the undue stimulation of the 
system itself, must, by the very nature of 
the disturbed nutritional balance, lead to 
an ultimate, though remoter breakdown. 

Nature is safe and reliable only to the 
extent we accept her fundamental, life-sus- 
taining propositions, and fall in line with 
her rythmic sweep of law. There is an 
inner vital, subjective — if you please — cor- 
respondence and reciprocity between the 
needs of the creature and the supply of 
creation, which, applied to individually spe- 
cified existence in its original unbroken purity, 
stands for an instinctively recognized ur- 
gency of a cell, or group of cells, towards 
replenishment from a given class or species 
of food stuffs, conditional to a harmoni- 
ous, beautiful, strong and useful develop- 
ment of the entity. 

As a sum total of the experiments carried 
on in the various laboratories and experi- 

61 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

mental stations throughout the world, con- 
cerning the character of free sugar as food, 
we find the following statements as gener- 
ally accepted points of argument. 

First — When the organism is adapted to 
the digestion of starch, and there is suffi- 
cient time for its utilization, sugar has no 
positive advantage over starch foods in sup- 
plying muscular energy during a protract- 
ed period of labor. 

Second — The positive advantage of sugar 
over starch lies in the fact that it furnishes 
the needed carbohydrate material for or- 
ganisms that have as yet little or no power 
to digest starch. Consequently in the ex- 
tract or free sugar, obtained from milk 
(sugar of milk) the infant has a valuable 
asset in the composition of his diet. 

Third — In time of great exertion and 
under the strain of exhaustive labors — child- 
birth may be counted as one — the rapidity 
with which sugar is assimilated gives it 
certain advantages over starch. Its rapid 
conversion or translation into heat or energy 
creates a flush of exhilaration and sense of 
available strength, which may suffice to 
carry the individual over the critical moments 
of£stress. It is this rapid-firing power of 
the sugar with its swift systemic invig- 
oration that makes sugar so highly relished 

62 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

by people of high-strung, emotional and 
nerve-exhausting temperament. It is this 
quality of force in the sugar which is in- 
stinctively recognized and coveted by the 
nervous, the irritable, the mentally stren- 
uous, whose main expenditure lies in loss 
of energy. The use of free sugar when 
applied to sluggish currents of energy in 
order to force them into higher levels, has 
a striking similarity to the starting of a quick 
fire by throwing a piece of cotton or a measure 
of coal oil into a stove. The evolution of 
heat is instantaneous, but of only passing 
permanence: while the injury wrought to 
the stove by a possible explosion may be 
permanent. On the other hand we can 
readily see, in the light of this illustration, 
how, by using sugar in order to modify the 
hyperdacity of imperfectly matured fruit, 
we gain the same advantage as by using 
some igneous material in connection with, 
and to the aid of, the slow combustiveness 
of green or incompletely seasoned fire-wood. 



63 



CHAPTER XIII 
SUGAR AS A FAT-FORMER 

When used to excess, or to an extent ex- 
ceeding the power of oxygen to convert it 
into energy and heat, the sugar may sohdify 
in the muscles and form fat or adipose tissue 
— a process which, being the output of an 
incomplete oxygenation, must, from a strictly 
physiological point of view, be regarded as 
a degree of tissue degeneration. Within cer- 
tain limits, however, fat is a food material, 
stored up in the system for future use, either 
to be burned into muscular energy, or used 
as a non-conductor for the conservation of 
systemic heat. And it is this quality of being 
an absolute non-conductor of heat that makes 
it possible for the system, through its fatty 
tissue, to maintain its normal constitutional 
heat, and to prevent it from being dissipated 
into sub-normal temperatures under the sap- 
ping influence of exterior cold. 

So far, so good. But if the fatty solidi- 
fication is intensified by an excessive sugar 
consumption, proceeding at a rate beyond 
the vital needs and conditions of the system, 
and an insufficient access to oxygen fails to 

64 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

completely energize the mass, fatty degener- 
acy with all its sluggishness and inertness 
of tissue function must follow as a natural 
and inevitable consequence. From being a 
non-conductor of heat the accumulating fat 
becomes a non-conductor of hfe, and the 
organs imbedded in its degenerate tissue 
become more or less isolated from the current 
of vital electricity normally polarizing the 
organism. The various ailments known as 
fatty degeneracy of the heart, waxy kidney, 
fatty liver, etc., indicate the gradual sur- 
render of the system, function after function, 
to the isolating, deadening effects of the 
accumulating adipose masses, walling in by 
msiduous steps the entire organism. And 
here again we are brought to face the old 
stern, inevitable problems of life as con- 
tamed in the philosophy of excess and balance. 
In other words, the very agent which, when 
employed in accord with physiological laws, 
as expressed in terms of demand and supply, 
and under the sw^ay of moderation and self- 
control, is productive of health, energy and 
power; if used in excess, and in slavish sub- 
mission to cravings and morbid appetites, 
subverts the direction of the entire vital 
process,— overpowering by its death-weights 
the very levers of life which normally move 
in rhythmic response to the sweep of mighty, 

65 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

evolutionary forces. Or again, the same 
element — sugar — which, when enjoyed in 
moderation, releases the muscular coil of 
high nervous efficiency, if used in excess of 
need, closes the coil into a life-strangling, 
muscle-withering, fatty degeneracy. Mod- 
eration and excess, whether in regard to 
sugar or any other form of food or stimulant, 
constitutes the two ends of the balancing scale 
of health and life, of w^hich the rising of the 
one, corresponds, with unfailing surety, to the 
lowering of the other. 

Furthermore, in the course of an excessive 
consumption of sugar, when the system has 
become over-stocked, not only with glycogen, 
but also with fat, the nerves, engaged in the 
production and fixation of the latter, become 
overtaxed, and lose their power of sustaining 
and vitalizing the overbalancing mass of 
adipose tissue. As a result, we have disin- 
tegration of the fatty structure with its 
subsequent organic breakdown into fatty 
acids; the toxic products of the bacterial 
invasion of the mass. Like the boomerang 
in its parabolic flight, the excess turns back 
upon itself. The gluttonous individual is 
forced to disgorge his nutritional overplus, 
and to return to nature his illegitimate gains. 
The microbe, the biological Nemesis or ele- 
mental adjustor of the organized universe^ 

66 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

has come to break down his storage vaults 
and return to their appropriate places his 
ill-gotten treasures. The fastidious glutton, 
violating Nature's sacred (because trusted) 
proprietorship, by indulging for his own 
selfish gratification in the fruits of her labors, 
devouring in wanton excess the bounties of 
life prepared by the great universal Mother 
for the joy, strength and usefulness of her 
children, stands powerless and forlorn in 
the wrecks and ruins of his own making. 
With his digestion ruined from repeated 
dietetic outrages, the man is famishing in the 
midst of plenty, while facing the unescapable 
dead-sea fruits of premature senility, func- 
tional collapse and social worthlessness. 

It is the old futile attempt of egotism and 
wanton self-indulgence to hold up Nature's 
vital express to appropriate the gifts intended 
to be placed upon the altar of love and use- 
fulness. In a moral universe every break of 
law, every infidelity in our attitude to trust 
and service, every excess or waste in our 
economic relations to life and nature, must 
sooner or later reach its point of limiting 
recoil, where the forces of a law-governed, 
but trespassed evolution return over paths 
of inverted progressions, to re-estabhsh peace, 
equity and moral poise between the indi- 
vidual and his deserted field of duty and 
usefulness. 



67 



CHAPTER XIV 
SUGAR AS A FORCE 

It is as a generator of fat and energy that 
sugar, without being a proteid, or muscle 
builder, holds the claim of being classed with 
foods. 

For in its normal state, fat is as important 
for an adequate discharge of functional life 
as is the striated or non-striated muscle. 
Without its proper insulation by the fat 
capsule the muscle would at once become 
exposed to nervous deflection and exhausture. 
Fat, as already shown, is a form of carbon — 
the end-product of sugar, not being used 
up in the generation of energy. Hence, 
sugar, in its natural form, performs a highly 
important role in the human nutrition, and 
is indispensable in a diet which aims at 
highest individual health and usefulness, men- 
tally as well as physically. 

Yet sugar is a force rather than a food. 
For if by food, we understand an impulse 
of life, manifesting as a concrete substance, 
capable of constructing and repairing the 
levers and pistons in the organized move- 
ments of entities; then, with force we mean 

68 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

the energy by which these implements of 
lite are brought into positions of leverages 
and mechanic displacements. Essentially 
however, foods and forces may be regarded 
as the same thing, differing as quantities 
only, not as qualities. All foods are forces 
but all forces are not foods. A force is the 
quintessence or attenuation of food— the con- 
centrated, intangible charge of the essence 
ot organized and organizable substance. In 
the evolution of food into force, Nature takes 
a step from the concrete and measurable 
into the abstract and illimitable. As a fat 
former, sugar is food; as an energy producer 
It IS a force. Food and force are the two 
mam departures in the generation or evolu- 
tion of a substance. But there is still another 
departure (for in the elemental changes of 
things there always appears a third)— the 
poison! These three steps, or departures, 
m the evolution, or devolution, of nature 
correspond irrisistably to the old Hindoo 
conception of a metaphysical ^'trimurti''— 
the Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva; the Creator, 
Preserver and Destroyer; the Food, the 
-borce, the Poison. 



69 



CHAPTER XY 
SUGAR AS A POISON 

An impulse, imparted to the human system, 
either mentally, morally or physically, if 
congenial to its general vital functions, and 
in synchronous relation to its rhythm as or- 
ganism, covers our conception of food, whether 
it be enjoyed by the body, mind or soul. 
Food imparts no shock to the system, in- 
troduces no uncongenial changes, but main- 
tains by means of repair and preservation, an 
unbroken serenity, and a progressive balance 
of individual unfoldment. 

Now as long as the rhythm of this vital 
impulse remains synchronous and harmon- 
ious to the constitutional key-note of the 
system, the latter responds by raising its 
cellular and functional activities to an ever 
higher level of efficiency. In other words, 
that though the vigor and vitality of the 
system have thus become intensified, and 
the vital exchanges made to proceed at a 
greater rapidity, no incongruous or disturb- 
ing element in the form of artificial stimu- 
lant has been thrown into the balance of 
the constitutional rhythm. In a word, food, 

70 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

in its congenial, rightly combined relations 
to individual needs, is translated by the 
cell into a vital force, which raises the entire 
organism into constantly increasing refine- 
ment and survival value. 

But if the vibrations of the new impulse 
have been inharmonious to the evolutionary 
order of the system; if the incoming current 
of vibrations has struck it at an angle in op- 
position to its constitutional plane of pro- 
gression, there ensues a clash in the contact. 
The rhythm of the system, involving the 
entire commonwealth of its cellular ex- 
change, is ruptured, and in proportion to 
the degree of rhythmic diversity of the two 
planes, is the severity of the shock. The 
alien impact may strike the system with 
the demolishing force of a tornado. The 
cell organisms become dazed; their functional 
activities subverted; the net-work of nerve 
connections torn and disordered; and the 
entire vital structure totters like a wrecked 
and stranded vessel. The elemental antag- 
onism of the substances involved in the 
contact, subverts a living force into a death- 
dealing poison. 

A poison, scientifically defined, is thus a 
force proceeding in its action along a differ- 
ent scale of vibration than the system into 
which it has been introduced. From this it 



71 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

follows that a poison may be rendered harm- 
less, either by subduing its rate of vibration 
through a process of neutralization, or by 
a reinforcement or intensification of the vital- 
ity of the system under attack. If the 
poison can be leashed to the rhythmic order 
of the organism on which it has a hold, its 
force is broken and the peril averted. It is 
on this principle that the standardized anti- 
dotes exert their saving qualities; they either 
adjust the system to the force, or the force 
to the system; they either subdue the poison, 
or reinforce the organism. 

According to its manner of treatment, 
sugar may become the one or the other of 
the above aspects; in its combination in the 
ripe fruit or vegetable, it is a food; in its 
"free^ or extracted form, it is a force; in its 
decomposed state as ^ ^organized' ^ acid, it is 
a poison. 



72 



CHAPTER XVI 

SUGAR AS A MEDICINE 

Owing to its concentrated form, sugar is 
at once a great antiseptic and a glandular 
excitant. The basis for this quality lies 
in the fact that in its extracted condition it 
has an elemental hunger, or chemical affin- 
ity, for every substance or essence from which, 
by the very fact of its extraction, it has 
become separated. Its artificial state, as 
^^free'^ sugar, turns it into a sponge of suction, 
ready to absorb any element from which, 
as compound, it has been separated. 
It is from this ruptured elemental balance 
that sugar derives its quality as medicine. 
Mixed with lard and melted in a vessel over 
a slow fire, sugar becomes a valuable salve, 
which, if spread over a wad of sterilized 
cotton, and applied over the surface of any 
inflamed interior structure such as the ovar- 
ies, tonsils, testis, lymphatics, etc., will ab- 
sorb the urates, carbonates, and other kin- 
dred toxins accumulated in the diseased 
tissues. The oxygen of the sugar will oxy- 
dize and burn up the poisons, retained and 
crystalized in the involved congestions. The 

73 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

broken-up indurations are then readily elim- 
inated by the blood current through the 
various organs of excretion. 

In corroboration of this fact, the late Dr. 
W. H. Burgess, of Chatanooga, Tenn., has 
found that a teaspoonful of sugar, held in 
the mouth for a period of five or ten minutes 
and then expectorated, if repeated two or 
three times on an empty stomach, will drain 
the glands of the head and neck from the 
poisons active in neuralgia, catarrh, deaf- 
ness, bronchitis, pharyngites and the various 
forms of sore and swollen throat. Dr. Bur- 
gess even seems to have reason for beheving, 
that this ''sugar cure" has power to in- 
fluence more or less every organ and tissue 
of the body, even as remote as those of the 
abdominal cavity and the pelvis. 

In this power of the sugar to absorb, by 
and through its vacuated carbon, the various 
toxic acids that poison the cells of the system. 
Materia Medica has found an immensely 
valuable agent in its work of restoring health 
and strength to broken-down tissues. Its 
action points out the moral of nature, the 
fine irony of universal law, compelhng the 
individual to retrace his steps in evolution 
and restitute his ill-kept vital records. The 
same force in sugar which as an object of 
over-indulgence wrecks him, will, when sub- 

74 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

jected to self-restraint, bring him back his 
lost estate of health. The acid of the sugar 
incarcerated the man, its vacuated carbon 
again released him. This gives to the sugar 
a new meaning — that of life-saver. From 
being a means of gustatory irritation and 
gluttonous appeals, it assumes the position 
of a remedial agent of most far-reaching 
therapeutic power. Reports of clinical ex- 
periments with regard to the therapeutic 
value of sugar, are constantly increasing in 
the medical pubUcations. Prof. Dingle, the 
famous London speciahst in disorders of the 
heart, reported quite recently in the British 
Medical Journal of a case in which the mitral 
valve had been damaged by over-exertion. 
Owing to the subsequent insufficiency of 
the heart-muscle to perform its role in the 
circulation, abnormal fluids had begun to 
collect in the abdomen to the extent that 
tapping had to be resorted to repeatedly. 
Every remedy within the reach of experience 
having failed, solutions of sugar was tried of 
one ounce five times a day. After three 
days' treatment the tapping was no longer 
required, and the increase in health and 
strength, following upon the new treatment, 
suffered no relapse up to the date of the Pro- 
fessor's report. A clinical feature of great 
significance was the heavy increase of urates 

75 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

and oxalates, the physiological ash or oxy- 
dates, resulting from the action of the sugar 
on the tissues, its carbon absorbing the or- 
ganized acids and thus breaking up the 
toxic compounds, accumulated in the system 
through the weak circulation due to the in- 
sufficiency of the heart. 

Similar reports have been made by Dr. 
Hausch and Prof. Behrend, of Berlin, Ger- 
many. Patients suffering from general de- 
bility have found in a judicious adminis- 
tration of sugar a new source to energy and 
health. In most cases, however, the sugar 
solutions are medically prepared and ad- 
ministered hypodermically, as ordinary cane 
sugar is found to be incongenial to the as- 
similative functions. Often a large per- 
centage of the sugar was found in the urine, 
eliminated from the system by the kidneys. 
An incident which may shed some light on 
the subject of sugar therapy is reported from 
a hospital in Edinburg, Scotland, where 
a patient afflicted with a severe attack of 
rheumatism had been advised by his phy- 
sician to ^'cut out" sugar from his daily 
ration. In consequence the rheumatism was 
duly cured, but in the course of time, symp- 
toms of general debility and nervous break- 
down began to show up. In his distress he 
returned to the hospital and asked his old 

76 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

physician for advice. Connecting the dis- 
continuation of the sugar with the new 
development, the physician allowed him ex- A 

perimentally a certain amount of ^^free sugar" 
daily. The patient showed signs of recovery 
from the very start, though the report did 
not include the fate of the kidneys, and 
the subsequent return to the old rheumatism. 

These various case reports are in perfect 
accord with the philosophy of sugar as set 
forth in this volume. They all go to show 
the effect of sugar on the human system of 
nutrition. It is in the very fact of ''free 
sugar'' being an abnormal substance, that i 
has its value as medical agent, and which on 
the same time distinctly and unmistakably 
points out its proper place in the human 
dietary. For v/hile its action as a chemical 
absorbant is of the greatest value toward 
the breaking up of accumulated tissue poisons 
in the system, yet its further actions on other 
body tissues, viz: kidneys and liver, may 
and does give rise to remoter complications. 
The safer way in employing sugar as medi- 
cine is to limit its application to external 
tissues. The transit form sugar as force, 
to sugar as poison is obscure and indeter- 
minable, and safe only under the guidance 
of the light of painstaking scientific experi- 
mentation. The very allurements connected 

77 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

with the taste of sugar should accompany 
its employment with a double caution, a scru- 
pulous restraint in its indulgence, either as 
food, as force, or poison, and only with a 
motive of health and general usefulness. 



78 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE MORAL APPLICATION OF ^TREE 

SWEETS'^ 

The extracted or concentrated form of 
sugar which we term 'Tree Sweets/^ stand 
in the same relation to the physical world, as 
temptation and the dead-sea-fruits of grati- 
fication, stand to the moral world. Either 
of these forms of sweetness, when in excess, 
turn readily into the general acidity of dis- 
gust and pain, physically and morally. On 
either plane the action of ' 'sweets" is to 
break up fixed compounds for the reorgan- 
ization of the new ones, which may either 
be higher or lower types of life, according 
to the motive, character and degree in- 
volved in the indulgence. Thus tempta- 
tions may be called ''moral sweets," which 
if extracted or rendered "free," i. e., indulged 
in for its own sake, will produce the same 
effect on the individual's moral nature as 
the indulgence and excess of "free sweets" 
on his physical nature: the break-down and 
dissolution of substances and principles in 
a swifter ratio than the vital constructive 
forces of his system can replace. By a 

79 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

recognition of these principles we are able 
to apply them as practical solvents to the 
problem of human life. 

As already pointed out, the ''sweets'^ con- 
tained in the natural products of evolution 
in the fruit, grain and vegetable, are indis- 
pensible in the work of dissolving old, used- 
up, and decomposing cell-structures in the 
system. Applied to morals this means that 
the sweets contained in the soul-trying events 
known as ^^temptations," — if countenanced 
and treated with the temperance, dignity 
and moral restraint as expressed in self-control, 
will generate those changes in the human 
mind, and introduce those assets of self- 
conscious experience and knowledge, which 
are back of and give rise to the formation 
and growth of character and manhood. And 
furthermore, as pathological changes, and 
subsequent breakdown of body tissues, are 
due to excessive indulgence in extracted 
or ^^free sugar;" so in a sorresponding way 
a mental and moral breakdown, with sub- 
sequent decay and dissolution of character, 
is the inevitable outcome of an indulgence 
in the ^^free sweets" of the moral plane. 
For what is immorality but the extract 
of natural events: the giving up to self- 
gratification, with the subsequent surrender 
of an individual's moral nature to soul and 
character-dissolving forces. 

80 



CHAPTER XVIII 

EVIDENCE FOR AND AGAINST THE 
USE OF SALT 

In the strong search-light which the chem- 
istry of an advanced physiology sheds upon 
the subject of diet, old, time-honored stan- 
dards are breaking down to give way to a 
new conception of the quantitative and qual- 
itative values of digestion and nutrition. 

Among the prevalent objections to the 
use of salt is the tendency of the latter to 
crystalize and cause a hardening and stiffen- 
ing of the body tissues. It is alleged that 
salt, being a mineral substance, is imper- 
vious to the action of the digestive juices, 
and hence becomes an encumbrance or pre- 
ventative in the digestion of salt-cured food- 
stuffs. Furthermore, as salt is a mineral, 
and as such unassimilable, it must be suffered 
to remain in the system as a foreign body, 
deposited in the capillaries in the form of 
crystalizations, and constantly threatening 
the individual with a hardening and rup- 
turing of his vital tissues. The final out- 
come would be some type or other of Artero- 
sclerosis, Bright's disease, Arthrodial Rheu- 

81 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

matism, etc., or at its best premature old 
age. 

In a recent publication of Dr. Willamer 
Stephanson, — the discoverer of the white 
Esquimaux, new arguments have been added 
to the above claims against the safe use of 
salt in the dietary. Dr. Stephanson, as a 
result of his experiences in the Arctic, 
considers salt as a positive hindrance to 
life. He describes its action upon himself 
and his followers as a narcotic poison, 
and found its use absolutely eliminated 
from the dietary of the Esquimaux, 
who would rather submit to the ravages of 
starvation than to use food cured or seasoned 
with salt. On the basis of this data, Dr. 
Stephanson draws the conclusion that sodium 
chloride — our common table salt — is incon- 
genial and harmful to the system, and its 
use in the dietary of the civilized races, a 
grave physiological error. Like tobacco, he 
says, salt has conquered our taste and in- 
stinct by the unnatural craving created by 
its indulgence as a stimulant, resulting in 
a habit difficult to break away from. ^^ Among 
the uncivihzed Esquimaux,'' he tells us, 
'^the dislike for salt is so strong that a salt- 
iness, imperceptible to me, would prevent 
them from eating at all." In connection 
with these observations he refers to fat as 

82 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

more agreeable to his taste than any other 
form of food, including meats and cereals. 
The Doctor at last gives as his firm convic- 
tion that salt is inimical to the pursuit of 
life and health, and advocates strongly its 
removal from our diet. 

Over and against these arguments, the 
advocates for the use of salt refer to its 
traditional recognition among all nations, 
and during all times and ages. The appel- 
lation made by Jesus to great characters, 
as the ^^Salt of the Earth/ ^ has been referred 
to as an evidence of the high opinion and 
universal recognition in which salt was held 
by the ancients. In the records of the 
old Norse people, as far back as in the Edda, 
reference is made to salt-cured meats; and 
in ancient Egypt and Greece, salt was re- 
garded as an indispensible article of diet. 
Among the modern nations few people em- 
ploy more salt-cured meats, and especially 
fish, than the Scandinavian. As regular as 
Scotchmen take their oatmeal, and the Amer- 
icans their Parkerhouse rolls and coffee to 
break their morning fast, the Scandinavian 
laborer takes his salt-cured bloater and black 
bread to start the course of his daily diet, 
which in the course of the day is to be fol- 
lowed by a noon meal and supper of additional 
salt meat or fish^ boiled or fried. With few 

83 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

exceptions the meat diet of the farm-hands 
and city-laborers of this time — and history- 
honored pennsula, consists of the preserved 
and pickled varieties, the year round. And 
yet their physical endurance, digestive power, 
and efficiency as laborers seems to suffer in 
no way from this dietetic excess of salt. 

Even in lands where natural barriers have 
isolated the people from the ways and habits 
of culture, such as inland China, the Russian 
Steppe, primitive North America, Australia, 
etc. with all the radical differences of the 
natives in other respects; with regard to 
salt, their taste-buds are all uniformly de- 
veloped. The unique craving by these na- 
ture-children for a substance, in spite of its 
alleged unfitness, not to say dangers, to 
health and life, remains an inexplicable and 
incongruous fact in the scientific theories 
of the modern food-reformer. 

Nor is this instinctive craving and relish for 
salt limited to the human species; it is dis- 
tinct both in the wild and domesticated 
animals. All throughout the arid regions 
of the temperate zone, are found what are 
called ^^deer licks" — deposits of rock salt — 
where cattle and horses, often after miles 
of trailing, come to enjoy a good old time, 
licking salt. Recognizing this peculiar crav- 
ing in the animals, the farmers in the northern 

84 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

countries, where cattle have to beTkept 
indoors on dry fodder during at least half 
of the year, have a custom to occasionally 
supply their stock with salt, which, by the 
latter, is always eagerly looked for. Besides 
a general functional sluggishness and loss 
of appetite, the animals in the absence of 
salt, manifest their need of its stimulation 
m a lessening, both as to quality and 
quantity, of their daily output of milk. 

What, to the naturalist, stand as mere 
interesting traits, become, to the student 
of biology, factors of great scientific sig- 
nificance. Thus, Dr. Barriere, of Lyons— 
a rising French scientist— has found reasons 
to believe that the entities of evolution 
are not only identical as to the character of 
their origin, but also as to the place of their 
origin. According to him, the cradle in 
which organic life found its first receptacle 
was rocked by the waves of the ocean, and 
its archaic cradle-song wrought in the treble 
clef of singing waves. ^The primitive life,'^ 
^u^^P^* .^^™^^e^ ' Vhich in Genesis is called 
the Spirit of God moving upon the waters,' 
sprang from the single cell. And this cell, 
vegetating m the plant or the animal, is 
continually bathed in a fluid, which, whether 
^^i^^ ^.^^^ of lymph, blood or vegetable sap, 
difters m no essential way from sea-water.'' 

85 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

Similarly, Prof. Jacque Loeb, of Chicago 
University, finds in saline preparations a 
most miraculous power to influence and 
promote the progress of life. In his albio- 
genetic and parthenogenetic experiments he 
suspends his unfertalized eggs for about 
two hours in a solution of 100 c. c. sea-water, 
which effects changes in the albumen of the 
eggs, leading up to the formation of the 
ominous membrane with its gelatinous zone, 
which constitutes the physical condition for 
fertiUzation and the biogenetic drama, which 
has its termination in the phenomena of 
cellular mitosis. 

No less argumentatively strong for the 
power of salt to influence vital processes, 
is the fact that a saline solution, injected 
hypodermically, is able to substitute, or 
replace, the loss of blood in an animal body 
to the extent of sixty per cent of the entire 
blood volume. Nor can we ignore the num- 
erous cures effected by mineral hot springs, 
especially in Germany, where immense crowds 
of people gather every year to regain their 
shattered health from the power of iron, 
sulphur, sodium or magnesium salts — by 
which the waters are charged. Medical prac- 
tice is not at all uncertain as to the power 
of certain mineral salts — viz., Mercury, Po- 
tassium, Sodium, etc. — to check, after a few 

86 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

doses, the ravages of syphilitic infection; 
while, on the other hand, the very power of 
mineral poisons to arrest vital processes is 
in itself an evidence of the power of these 
poisons to enter dynamically into the very 
sanctum sanctorum of cell life. For the 
power of destroying life demonstrates the 
active presence of an influence which is 
no less deep-reaching and ^effective than the 
power of generating life. Hence, the de- 
fenders of salt in its general usage, have 
certainly recourse to powerful evidences, not 
only for the possibility of saline absorption 
and metabolization in the human body, but 
also for its qualification to meet a strong 
vital need. 



87 



CHAPTER XIX 
THE FUNDAMENTAL BASIS OF SALT 

Then, after all, what is salt? Whence 
its origin, its powers, its necessity? Is the 
nature of salt in any way — and if so, in what 
way — conditioning the evolution and the 
maintenance of life on this planeAt? 

In the chemical formulary salt is defined 
as an oxidation product arising from the 
action of oxygen and hydrogen on a metal. 
At the encounter of the two elements on the 
field of a mineral substance, the latter gradual- 
1}^ yields to the attack and decomposes in 
the form of rust. This rust is the mineral 
ash, remaining as an end-product of the de- 
composed mineral elements, after the co- 
hesive force back of its characteristic group- 
ings of atoms is set free. 

Oxygen and Hydrogen are the forces of 
breakdown and renewal, employing elemental 
affinity as their levers or agencies of action. 
Thus, salt may be the end-product of multi- 
ple elemental decompositions, obtaining its 
name and characteristics from the two or 
more minerals involved. Hence, in a com- 
bination, let us say of Magnesium and Sul- 

88 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

phur, the oxidation product becomes the 
famihar Epsom Salt (MgS04). If the field 
consists of Sodium and Sulphur, the result 
of the combination is Glauber Salt (NaS04). 
If it be Sodium and Borate, we get Borax 
(Na2B407), etc. Finally if the combina- 
tion is Sodium and Chloride, the output is 
our familiar table condiment — our common 
salt (NaCl), Socium Chloride. 



89 



CHAPTER XX 

SALT AT ONCE A PRESERVATIVE AND 
A DESTROYER 

It is the peculiar origin of salt, arising as 
it does from processes of decomposition and 
disunion, that accounts for its subsequent 
influence on the composition of the organic 
or inorganic substances on which its influences 
is brought to bear. A duality in its com- 
position, the very nature of salt is at once 
to preserve and to destroy, to condense and to 
evaporate; with one arm producing and with 
the other reducing — centrifugal in its atomic 
action, and centripetal in its moleculer. 

Now the basis and the perpetuity of form 
lies in the undisturbed rhythmic interaction 
between the intrinsic and extrinsic proper- 
ties of any substance. A change in this 
rhythm, due either to internal or external 
interruption — thermal, mechanical or chem- 
ical, — by disturbing the molecular balance 
of the compound, invites the dissolving at- 
tack of the hydrogen-oxygenions. A fissure 
or crannie in a rock provides at once an 
opportunity for this dissolving elemental play. 

90 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

And the rusting away of a metal, or the 
crumbhng away of a granite, display, con- 
cretely, the processes of dissolution and 
resolution engendered in the respective sub- 
stances. Like the microbes entering the field 
of a disturbed physiologic rhythm in the lungs 
of a consumptive proceed to disorganize 
and remove the ruptured tissues, so the fiery 
attack of the Hydrogen-Oxygen ion on the 
exposed substance of a fissured rock, starts a 
process of dissolution which sooner or later 
must involve the reduction of a solid granite 
boulder into a vitrious, formless mass — the 
ash of combustion with its resultant inor- 
ganic salt. The evolution of water, present 
in the moisture of vapor, accompanying all 
combustion, organic or inorganic, reveals 
the identity of the engaging elements. It 
is a metamorphosis of the atoms of the 
temporarily divorced Hydrogen-Oxygen com- 
bination, reappearing in the ensuing water 
molecule, H20 — the type of universal equi- 
poise — after having spent their excess of 
chemical energy in the attack. For it is 
this exhausture and subsequent loss of iden- 
tity of the elements as they disappear in 
the new-formed compounds, that lie at the 
basis of the entire chain of the biochemical 
phenomena of the world. As the atom of 
life, the biological unit, while passing through 

91 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

its short cycles of formed and lost affinities, 
pre-figures the metamorphosis of the organic 
kingdoms from seed to plant and fruit, and 
back again into the seed; or, as in the still 
higher forms of evolution, from larva to pupa 
and subsequent butterfly, — so the atom or 
unit of chemistry, exhibits the same prin- 
ciple of evolution in the kingdom of the 
inorganic world. Merging its identity as 
atom into the compound of a new molecular 
body, in the course of the cyclic dissolution 
of that form, it is again released and restored 
to its elemental identity. In the chemistry 
of salt, the engaging elements, the Hydro- 
Oxygen ions, in their exhausted state are 
found to disappear into the compound of 
water, from which again, in the process of 
dehydralization or evaporation, they regain 
their original unity and elemental balance. 

This conception of salt, as a product of 
decomposition, is borne out by every new 
discovery in the field of chemistry. For 
what are the radio-active phenomena of the 
Roentgen rays, Actinic rays, Finsen rays, N 
rays, etc., but the incidental manifestation 
of an all-embracing process of elemental 
break-down engendered by two world-des- 
troyers and world-rebuilders — the Hydro-Ox- 
ygen. Thus the new metal, Helium, con- 
stitutes a field of action where the ominous 

92 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

Hydroxyle is at work wrecking an element 
the decomposition product of which, meets 
us in the radium salt. The quality of des- 
tructiveness characteristic to the radium salts, 
and often fatal to the tissues exposed to its 
action, indicates unmistakably its true nature 
and genesis. The phenomena of light ac- 
companying radium decomposition, reveals 
the intensity of the elemental disintegra- 
tion. 



93 



CHAPTER XXI 

HOW THE PRINCIPLE OF SALT EX- 
PLAINS THE PHENOMENON OF THE 
X-RAY. 

The power of salt to change the constitution 
of substances brought under its influence 
exemplifies the operation of an ever-present 
law or principle in the universe — the in- 
fluence exerted by one substance or subject 
over another. For the philosophy of in- 
fluence is expressed in the power of an agent 
to impose its rate of systemic vibrations, or 
its tenor of life — its keynote — on any object 
or entity responsive to the influence. It is 
the functional or constitutional identifica- 
tion, transmitted through the power of in- 
fluence, that compels one violin string to 
respond in consonance with another of the 
same tonal quality. And it is in this transfer 
of constitutional identification between sub- 
stances, subject to each other's influence, that 
explains the power of salt to impart rigidity 
and crystalization to the substance brought 
under its influence, (whether it be the muscles 
of the butchered beef or the living muscles 
of the human body), if salt has been used too 

94 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

freely in the dietary. In the case of radium 
salt a new quality is added to its influence. 
The immense rate of vibration character- 
istic to the molecules of this salt gives rise 
to a swiftness amounting to luminosity — a 
state of vibration, which, in accordance with 
the principle of influence, becomes trans- 
mitted to the substance on which it acts. 
Hence the radium salts, to the extent the 
different tissues respond to its vibration, 
gives rise to the X-ray and its phenomena of 
transparency. Focahzed on the physical 
body, the substance of the latter is thrown 
into the radio or rhythm of the radium light 
itself, and consequently becomes identical in 
vibration with the latter : — which means luni- 
inosity. So sweeping and fundamental is 
this law of vibration, that its application 
governs consciousness itself in the power of 
influence exerted by one mind over other 
minds. The stronger mind imposes the rate 
or quality of its own vibration on the weaker 
mind, resulting in an approach to similarity or 
rather identity of conscious perception in 
form of moral or mental conviction. 

Hence the same principle that lies back of 
the curative power of meat, lies back of the 
curative power of mind: it is the power or 
quality of one form or expression of energy 
to impose its characteristics, by means of 

95 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

enforcing its own rate of vibration, upon a 
substance or subject of less power of resistance 
than itself. 



96 



CHAPTER XXII 

WHAT THE ^^SALT OF THE EARTH'^ 
MEANS TO PHYSIOLOGICAL CHEM- 
ISTRY 

What is the real mission of salt in the human 
body and in what particular processes can 
its beneficent effects be traced in the tissues 
and viscera subjected to its action? An 
output of disintegration -a mineral or physio- 
logical ash-product, — the nature of salt is 
thus to impart its characteristic to every 
substance in which it succeeds generating 
chemical action. And furthermore, as dis- 
integration involves a dual process: the crys- 
talization of solids and evaporation of liquids, 
the condensation or hardening of the fibrous 
tissues of the body, with a subsequent re- 
lease of its fluidic elements, -we are forced to 
admit that sodium chloride (common salt) 
occupies a high vital significance in the 
metabolism of the human body. 

Like the sword of Mohammet, salt has a 
dual nature, and only through a close obser- 
vation of its variegated employment as a 
therapeutic agent are we able to define its 
seeming paradoxical^action. Thus, while its 

97 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

effect as cathartic is due to its powers of 
evaporation and subsequent collection in 
the intestines of excessive fluids, thereby 
causing evacuation, so the on other hand, 
its reactionary influence in the hardening 
and ossification of the body tissues arises 
from the opposite phase of evaporation — 
condensation. Furthermore, the presence of 
salt in the system sets free body-serums and 
general aqueous accumulations in the various 
tissues, -a fact which explains the power of 
the hypodermic injection of a saline solution 
to compel the different body-tissues to set 
free any available serum, and pour it out into 
the general circulation. The paralized heart- 
muscle, reacting under the same influence, 
responds to the impulse, and by re-assuming 
its integral rhythm of expansion and con- 
traction, starts anew the pistons and levers 
of the human dynamo, swinging the vehicle 
safely over a threatening collapse. 



98 



CHAPTER XXIII 



HOW SALT CAN BE AT ONCE THE 
SAVIOUR AND DESTROYER OF LIFE 



The constant manufacture in the system 
of sodium chloride indicates its elemental 
necessity in the economy of body nutrition. 
For whenever in the course of our daily 
diet, we introduce sodium into our system, 
which happens every time we eat spinach, 
beets, lettuce, strawberries, red meat, or 
any other sodium-carrying substance, we 
start a chemical action between this element 
and the chlorine contained m the gastric 
secretions, with the subsequent evolution 
in the system of sodium chloride and water, 
which means that hydrogen and oxygen, 
after having engendered the decomposition 
of the involved elements, disappear in the 
cyclic retirement of their union in the form 
of water. But the fact that salt, the product 
of decomposition, is continually formed in 
the system, indicates beyond doubt that as 
organic or inorganic compound NaCl has an 
important and indispensible work to perform 
in the generation and support of life. 

99 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

Now it is by virtue of the accelerating 
action of salt on the destruction and dis- 
placement of tissue, that its importance in 
the vital processes of organized existence is 
especially made evident. Its power to break 
up fiuidic and gaseous combinations makes 
its presence a necessary condition for the 
elimination from the system of carbonic 
acid gas, lactic, oxalic and uric acids, am- 
monia, and other body poisons, which, 
through the affinity they wield over the toxins 
in the blood, arrest its oxydizing and tissue- 
building functions. 

It is the quality of salt, however, to re- 
lease and set free substances that constitute 
its peculiarity of being at once a source of 
life and a source of death. For the opposite 
pole of evaporation is crystalization, and 
the drying up of a fluid naturally leaves in 
its place a residue of deepening crystaliza- 
tion. If, then, the supply of salt in the 
system, owing to excess in its consumption, 
exceeds the demand of bodily elimination, 
the physiological balance breaks down, fol- 
lowed by a progressive formation of deposits 
and their gradual hardening into degenerating 
crystalizations of muscles and viscera — con- 
ditions which we recognize as the basic patho- 
logical features in Artero-Schlerosis, Cardiac 
Degeracy, Renal Calculi, and the various 

100 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

progressive forms of Arthritis Deformans. 

It is this power of salt, at once to evaporate 
and crystahze, that preserves substances from 
decomposition and decay; while on the other 
hand, it is this very virtue that renders 
salt-cured meat difficult for any but strong 
stomachs to digest. For meat is preserved 
by the progressive release of fluids engendered 
by the action of salt in the tissues,-a process 
which proceeds from without inwardly, from 
the surface to the center, while isolating 
segment after segment from bacterial invas- 
ion. 

Thus, while salt moderately enjoyed has 
the power to prevent decomposition and 
putrifaction of the tissues within or with- 
out the body, its excess on the other hand, 
leads to the very opposite, to the crystal- 
ization and arrest of organized life. As 
long as the high cellular vitality of youth 
succeeds in continually bursting the saline 
deposits formed by the ceaseless separation 
of solids and fluids in the growing organism, 
the functional integrity of the individual is 
secured. The balance between evaporation 
and crystalization in the body serum remains 
physical body, this process of disinfection 
is maintained by the action of Sodium 
Chloride, either generated in the system 
itself, or introduced as common salt by way 
of our daily food. 

101 



CHAPTER XXIV 



WHY THE ESQUIMAUX ABHORS SALT 
IN HIS DIETARY 



Scientifically speaking, it is the very fact 
that salt is shunned as a poison by the dwel- 
lers of the polar region, that furnishes an 
evidence for its unique and special qualities 
in relation to life. Hence, so far from 
being an evidence against the use of salt, 
the observations of Dr. Stephanson point 
to the presence of active principles in salt, 
which have physiological value for us to the 
extent we become related to them by force 
of our environments. 

Now as means of preservation, the action 
of cold, and the action of salt, bring out 
identical results in regard to animal tissue. 
In either case the action, if sufficiently in- 
tense, leads to crystalization. From the fore- 
going we have already seen that salt, by its 
dual processes of evaporation and condensa- 
tion, brings about a state of normal equili- 
brium between the fluids and the solids of 
the tissues subjected to its action. A de- 
ficiency of salt will lead to putrification; 
an excess to crystalization. 

102 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

In the polar regions the function of tissue 
preservation is carried out by the influence 
of an unrelenting all-penetrating cold. In 
close correspondence to salt, the action of 
frost is characterized by outward evapora- 
tion and invv ard sohdification. Ice by thus iso- 
lating the substances under its influence 
from the access of oxygen, the presence 
of ice renders putrifaction impossible. 
The preservative power of the cold storage 
process has its basis in this fact, which, at 
the same time, lies back of the preservative 
power of salt. In either process, we meet 
the dual action of evaporation and solidi- 
fication with the subsequent isolation of 
the field of action, from the aerobic (oxygen- 
feeding) microbe of putrification. 

Reafizing that life in the Artie means a 
close hfe-and-death struggle of the individual 
agamst the crystalizing rigor of an all-pierc- 
mg frigidity, it is readily seen why salt, in 
itself a refrigerant, must not only be super- 
fluous to existence in this region, but add 
to the severity of the mortal conflict. Salt 
would proceed to attack the system from 
within, on the same tissue-shriveling, blood- 
coagulating principle as the intense 
cold from without. This again would 
render the struggle between the attacking 
and defending forces of existence altogether 

103 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

unequal, and speedily exterminate every form 
of vegetative possibility v\^ithin certain limits 
of standardized geographical demarcations. 
It is the instinctive realization of this vital 
fact that makes the Esquimaux close his 
flesh-pot to the superfluous seasoning of 
the salt-shaker. 

The same reason lies back of the fact 
that there is no room for fruits and vege- 
tables on the dining table of the Esquimaux. 
The Sodium, Iron and Magnesium, present 
in lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, etc., would 
solidify his blood serum into icicles. Not 
even cereals, with their large percentage of 
organic salts, can be enjoyed with safety, 
except as a very small percentage of the 
general diet. Only fat, with its absolute 
freedom from every reducing constituent, 
offers perfect assurance of a safe and whole- 
some article of high-arctic diet. 

The same cause that keeps salt out of the 
Arctic keeps it out of the Tropics. The 
intense heat of the latter region performs 
the same physiological function as the intense 
cold of the former. In either case we find 
the same duality of forces with an object to 
render conditions suitable for the perpetua- 
tion of life — the evaporation of fluids, and 
solidification of solids. The swift evapora- 
tion in the Tropics of organic fluids prevents 

104, 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

the stagnation of exposed substances, which 
again precludes the generation and culture 
of putrifactive bacteria. The Tropics and 
Arties, though antipodes in climate, are 
identical in their principles of vital preser- 
vation. In either case amospheric con- 
ditions perfom the sme antiseptic and germi- 
cidal functions in these regions of heat and 
cold, as salt performs in the intermediate— 
the Temperate. Salt is substituted in the 
Arctics by fats, in the Tropics by sweets. 
As the former, by softening and modifying 
the progressive solidification of tissue due 
to^ the crystalizing action of cold, main- 
tains the balance of life in the Arctics, so 
the sweets of the fruits accomplishes a 
corresponding feat in the Tropics. 



105 



CHAPTER XXV 

WHY LIFE IN THE TEMPERATE ZONE 
NEEDSJSALT FOR ITS MAINTEN- 
ANCE 

It is under the stress of this un- 
escapable logic that in the Temperate zone 
we are prepared to find conditions that 
demand both sugar and salt for the main- 
tenance of their ph^^siological and biological 
balance. For while the cold of that region 
is not severe enough to accomplish the 
work of preservation through frigid crystal- 
ization, nor the heat intense enough to bring 
about the same result through evaporation, 
the balance of organized existence finds its 
sustaining agency in the free distribution 
of salt, both as mineral deposits and as active 
ingredients of plants. The number of so- 
called ^^salt licks/' scattered broad-cast over 
the Temperate zone, provide opportunRies 
for hordes of grazing animals to satisfy their 
instinctive craving for salt. 

It is significant that in this Temperate 
zone, with its vital demand for salt, the 
forces of moral and mental evolution have 



106 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

reached their high-water mark of expression. 
In this evolutionally high-strung zone of 
existence, bordering on antipodes of extremes 
of heat and cold, forces of self -adjustment 
are at work, which for their maintenance 
require the dual agency of both salts and 
sweets, of both vegetables and fruit. The 
tremendous expressiveness and versatilities 
of existence in the Temperate zone, arising 
from its necessity to deal with vital problems 
of every type and condition of a South and 
of a North, demands quick access to every 
means and method of unfoldment, involving 
needs and exigencies pecuHar to every longi- 
tude and latitude of the planet. 

It is self-evident that generahzations which 
may be logical and true, as far as they apply 
to the stereotyped conditions of a given 
zone or center of existence, must utterly 
fail when applied to regions where different 
environments and conditions of life give 
rise to altogether different needs and neces- 
sities. In the Temperate zone, where the 
general typical conditions offer the highest 
possibilities for physical, moral and intellec- 
tual development; where the blending of 
antipodal environments present the most 
diversified and universal demands on the 
individual for adequate self-adjustment, and 
where unique and imperative needs in the 

107 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

midst of a boundless variety of supply offers 
an illimitable range of choice, we are entering 
situations of life that lead us to an evolution 
of free will, and to the cultural triumphs 
arising from altruistic motives. 

Limitations in means, lead to limitations 
in ends, as the height of attainment stands 
in direct correspondence to the range of 
individual choice. In the frigid zone, cultural 
endeavors are paralyzed by the demands of 
life, exceeding the suppl}^ of life, and where 
stereotyped conditions for existence set im- 
passable barriers for diversified individual 
development. In the Torrid zone the ex- 
pense of individuality has been kept back 
by the very opposite reason — the supply 
exceeding the demand. In the former, life 
is retreating before a stimulant to which 
organized existence is inadequate to respond; 
in the latter, life sits still because there is 
no stimulus to elicit its higher powers of 
response. The one succumbs from lack of 
life, the other from an excess of life. 

But in the Temperate zone the individual 
triumphs over his environments because of 
having powers level with his opportunities. 
It is not the abuse of the means of life, nor 
their disuse, that lead toward the elevation 
of humanity, but the full enjoyment of 
environment, while under the gauge of in- 

108 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

dividual self-control. The ingenuity of man 
has no other source, power or inspiration 
than in his efforts to make opportunities 
out of life, and life out of opportunities. 
Limitations of choice mean limitations of 
attainments. At a certain stage of develop- 
ment temptation itself becomes a means of 
moral development, and virtue the progeny 
of understood and conquered vice. It is 
in the wrestling with vice that innocence 
may evolve the power of virtue. Only the 
freedom and opportunity of choice can open 
to us the kingdom and mastery of free moral 
will. 

And it is here the Temperate zone offers 
us the key to destiny. Its very name brings 
out its quality of virtue. To live in the midst 
of accessible infatuations and yet remain 
temperate; to hear the call of wild passions 
reverbrate in our ear, and 3^et remain loyal 
to the ''still small voice'' of conscience: 
to use the fruits of the earth, sugar and salt, 
fats and acids, starches and proteids, spices 
and condiments, not as ends, but as means; 
not as slaves to enjoyment, but as masters 
of choice, with knowledge as guide. And 
as usefulness and altruism, as motives, hold 
the key to the deeper meaning of life, it is 
the Temperate zone that, in the fullest 
scope, brings out the material aspects and 

109 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

opportunities for highest attainments. The 
determination of the individual to utihze, 
for moral purpose, the products of life, 
makes him the true beneficiary of the tran- 
scendal virtues. 



110 



CHAPTER XXVI 

CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN ^TREE 
SWEETS'' AND ^XOOSE MORALS" 

Sugar is to the physical world, what 
temptation and its dead-sea fruit gratifica- 
tion is to the moral world. On either plane 
the action of ''sweets'' is to loosen or break 
up fixed compounds for the reorganization 
of new ones; and if the process is normal and 
law-governed, the result will be higher, more 
enduring forms and types of life. Thus 
we may regard temptation as a ''moral 
sweet," which, if extracted or rendered "free," 
1. e., indulged in or gratified, will produce 
the same effect on the individuals' m.oral 
nature as the indulgence in extracts of "free" 
sweets upon his physical: the breakdown • 
and dissolution of substances and principles 
m a swifter ratio than the vital constructive 
forces of his system can replace. And this 
introduces the natural equation of the problem 
involved. For as the sw^eets, contained in 
the natural products of evolution, in the 
fruits, grains, and vegetables, are required 
for the dissolution of old and used-up struc- 
tures in the body, so as to insure a higher 

lU 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

functional efficiency, so the ^^moral sweets'', 
contained in the trying events of hfe, known 
as temptations, if met with temperance, 
dignity and moral restraint, which consti- 
tutes self-control, will generate those changes 
in the human mind and introduce those 
assets into self-conscious experience and 
knowledge, which give rise ro the formation 
and growth of character and manhood. And 
furthermore, as the pathological changes and 
progressive breakdown of body-tissues are 
due to excessive indulgence in '^free'' sugar, 
so, in a corresponding way, the mental and 
moral breakdown, with its subsequent decay 
and dissolution of character, is the inevitable 
outcome of indulgence in the ^'free'' sweets 
of the moral plane. In either case it is 
the stimulation and gratification of the 
immoral impulse to yield to the bitter, 
unripe fruit of soul-degrading pleasures, 
sense-slavery and self -contempt. 



112 



CHAPTER XXVII 

THE ^'SALT'' AND THE ^^SWEET" OF 
THE EARTH 

As to the moral plane, ''free'' sugar stands 
for the extracted and enjoyed sweets of 
temptation, with the threatening processes 
of mxoral breakdown in consequence, so in a 
corresponding way, ''free' or inorganic, i. e. 
mineral, salt, stands for the preservation or 
fixation of character. And furthermore, as 
salt in its mineral rigidity, unchanged by 
the liberating, ever-stirring, ever-advancing 
forces of opposing polarities, gradually pre- 
serves and crystalizes into inanimation and 
death the forms and substances subjected 
to its action, so likewise character, if per- 
mitted to become "fixed" in its limited self- 
sufficiency, and kept isolated from the fresh, 
l)alancing, swelling impulses of a sympathetic 
solidarity with its environment, runs the 
risk of crystaiizing into dormant, lifeless, 
theorizing, with its inability of vital response, 
its intolerance and egotism. 

Applied to the moral plane, salt stands for 
strength of type, perseverance of effort, and 
immutability of purpose. Hence to deserve 

113 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

the title of ^^the salt of the earth/' means to 
be a moral bulwark, a self-denying, self- 
sacrificing, vital breaker fixed in the tumul- 
tuous sea of life; a veritable ^'rock of the 
ages," supporting by its very rigidity the 
finer, fluidic, progressive and exalting ele- 
ments of universal life. The ^^salt of the 
earth" refers unmistakably to a phase of 
faith— solid, severe, unyielding — which has 
it enduring and redeeming virtue in 
personal sacrifice; while the ^^sweet" of the 
earth represents the very opposite phase of 
existence, the principle of ever-fluctuating, 
ever-soaring or sinking, ever-consumed or 
consuming emotion — the affections, sympa- 
thies, passions, elegies and pathos of human 
existence, which if divorced from the ''salt 
of the earth^' must wither in its own light, 
burn up in its own conflagration. 

Again, narrowed down to its concrete, 
practical levels, the ''sweets of the earth" 
represent the sum-total of organic acids, the 
fruits, etc., while the "salt of the earth," on 
the same basis of definition, stands for the 
carriers of organic salts, the grains and 
vegetables. The latter enter the body-meta- 
bolism as transmitters of constructive, ce- 
menting, fundamentally conserving forces; 
the former as an energizing, impelling, gen- 
erative, ceaselessly stirring and combustive 

114 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

impulse — the principle of unfoldment and 
growth in natural evolution. Creeping out 
from the soil in which it remains partly 
buried, the vegetable draws its energies from 
the mineral world; while the fruit ripening 
in the mJd-air and bathed in sunlight and 
oxygen, draws its energies from atmospheric 
storage batteries. Thus, while the former 
is an exponent of the earth and its rugged 
solidity, the latter stands for the intangible 
fairy realm of light, expanse and freedom. 

From this, it naturally follows that the 
health and fulness of physical life can be 
maintained only through a proper adjustment 
of the vital balance of organic elements 
represented in acids and salts, fruits and 
vegetables; in the elements engaged in dis- 
solution and resolution; in convulsive growth 
or reactionary resistance; generative excess 
or conservation of species. Any violation of 
this code of vital ethics, any effort to compel 
nature to surrender her integrity for the 
gratification of any base or untrue appetite 
in man, means directly or indirectly an act 
of self destruction. Human ingenuity, goaded 
by unholy and artificial wants may succeed 
in extorting shocking advantages from the 
administrative energies of natural evolution; 
but the genius of retribution is continually 
at \\ork, compelling the transgressor, through 

115 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

the executioners of sickness and suffering, 
to restore, in terms of enforced personal 
renunciations, the things and substances that 
once served him toward the attainments of 
his base and degenerating pleasures. 



116 



CHAPTER XXVIII 
THE VALUE OF SALT IN MEDICINE 

The therapeutic value of salt has been 
known and utihzed by the medical profession 
from time immemorial. Its preservative 
qualities are referred to in the ' 'Sermon on 
the Mount" as symbols for strength and 
purity of human character. In the philoso- 
phy of the Rosicrucians, when medicine was 
yet regarded as an art, and the practitioner 
a high priest in the temple of life, receiving 
his inspirations or instructions from powers 
inherent as principles in the elemental world, 
salt occupied an important position in the 
group of agents sustaining the integrity of 
human life. In the studies and researches 
of these inspired dreamers, salt came next 
to the ''Red Powder'^ as a governing element 
in the vital compound which has survived 
in name, if not in virtue, as the "Elixir of 
Life." 

Like sugar, its twin element, salt bears a 
twofold relation to the evolutionary process 
— evaporation and condensation. Applied to 
human life and its vegetative necessities, 

117 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

these qualifications give to salt its unique 
power of loosening or binding, setting free 
or locking up, drawing in or pushing out 
the organized pistons and levers of the human 
engine. 

The virtue of the salt-water bath finds in 
this fact its cause and explanation. By its 
contact with the cuticle it starts in every pore 
a process of evaporation, by which a stream 
of stagnant humors is forced out through 
the skin, while the simultaneous process of 
condensation creates a demand for an in- 
crease of the blood-stream, and subsequent 
stimulation of the system toward a renewal 
and re-inforcement of its tissues and capil- 
laries throughout the entire vascular exchange. 

If the exposures to the saline influence, 
however, becomes too frequent, and the 
products of condensation are formed at a 
faster rate than the systemic circulation 
can dissolve and eliminate, the consequences 
will be a walling up of the pores by a mass of 
impenetrable crystalizations. 

This condition often gives rise to foul, 
running sores on the bodies of people whose 
occupation keeps them exposed to the in- 
fluence of salt, such as salt-works operatives, 
swimming-teachers, and natives of islands 
where a mild temperature and easy access 
to water offer great opportunities for salt 

118 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

sea bathing. The ulcerations of the skin, 
which are almost typical to the inhabitants 
of the Hawaiian and other South Sea Islands, 
are due to an excessive exposure to salt. 
The rapid accumulation of sediments in the 
pores due to an enforced evaporation, is 
over-balancing the disolving power of the 
blood and lymph, while the perversion of 
the nerve power back of the vascular ex- 
change results in a collapse of the mechanism 
of normal elimination. In place of proceed- 
ing along the natural channels through the 
pores and orifices of elimination, the latter 
breaks out through the surface of the skin 
in the form of eruptions, boils and running 
ulcers. 

Like sugar, salt is a great stimulant. In 
cases of extreme exhaustion, due to extensive 
loss of blood, saline solutions, subcutaneously 
injected, almost miraculously restore the 
patient to life and health. The Rational 
of this process is identical with the one above 
described. The inherent centrifugal motion 
governing the nature of the salt, expressed 
in its two phases of evaporation and con- 
densation, by setting free the fluids available 
in the various tissues of the body, succeeds 
in maintaining the action of the systemic 
circulation until the blood manufacturing 
functions have found time and means to 



119 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

replenish the body with a medium for an 
adequate vascular exchange. 

This therapeutic influence of salt on the 
mucus membranes of the body, renders it a 
very valuable remedy in the treatment of 
catarrh in the nose and pharyngeal structures. 
The immersion of the entire face in a normal 
salt solution, while allowing the fluids to flow 
up through the nose, down the pharynx and 
out through the mouth, will cause the in- 
flamed membrane to give off its stagnant 
serum and at the same time induce an in- 
creased action of the blood stream, with 
the subsequent reconstruction of the diseqsed 
and broken-down cellular tissues. 

The same principle that governs the action 
of Sodium Chloride (our common salt) is 
a factor in the behavior of all other salts in 
organic or inorganic chemistry. The action 
of Mercurial Salt on the syphilistic tissues 
its explanation in the unfoldment of the 
same principle of evaporation and conden- 
sation. The key which fits every physiologi- 
cal or pathological problem, where the action 
of salt is involved, is contained in the simple 
fact of its being a product of oxidation. It 
is an ash remaining after the combustion of 
any oxidizable or combustible element. The 
difference between oxidation and combus- 
tion consists in the character of the sub- 



120 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

stance involved. Disolution of an organized 
substance means combustion and results in 
the liberation of water, Carbon-Dioxide, and 
ash; the dissolution of a mineral substance 
is characterized as oxidation, and gives off 
Oxygen, Hydrogen and Salt. 

It is this devitalized or evacuated condi- 
tion of salt that lies back of its powers to 
give rise to processes of evaporation and 
condensation in substances, with which it 
comes in touch. For just as fire, by trans- 
mitting its rythm or key note of molecular 
vibration to surrounding substances, spreads 
the conflagration, in its own destructive 
fashion; so in a similar way, salt to the extent 
it predominates, reduces substances to its 
own characteristics. The same principle is 
applicable to the phenomenal structure of 
ice. It is the principle of contagion at work 
in all nature, the transposition of molecules 
along a rate or rythm of vibration diverging 
from the original normal. This power of 
transmitting an impulse along a current of 
molecular vibration from one object to another 
is noticed in the transmission of sound from 
one violin to another of the same key, though 
separated by every other means than that 
of rythm; and it is this same power of rythm 
that enables one substance to transmit its 
own state of vitality or disolution to any 

121 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

other rythmically responsive substance, be 
it through the medium of fire, ice, rust, 
fever, inflamation or corruption. It is the 
power of this rhythmic influence, exercised 
by the body, mind or soul on animate or 
inanimate nature, that causes the rising or 
sinking of entities from one state into another, 
from normal into abnormal, from health 
into disease, or vice versa, according to the 
character of the initiating impulse, and to 
the receptivity of the substance or subject 
under influence. 

Applied to human tissues, salt may spell 
construction or destruction, according to the 
intensity and duration of the application. 
If applied long enough so as to permanently 
transpose or transmit the rate of its own 
vibration to the involved tissues, the latter 
may gradually become organized into a state 
of progressive dissolution. Mercurial ulcers 
of progressive dissolution. Mercurial ulcera- 
tions, which often result from a protracted 
application of these salts to syhphilistic 
tissues, at once illustrate and demonstrate 
the power of salt to impart its ratio of mo- 
lecular vibration to tissues to which it is 
applied, and thus perpetuate its own charac- 
teristic tendency of disolution to processes 
of corrosion and corruption of the human 
flesh. It brings up the spectacle of elemental 

122 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

dissolution transmitted to animated tissues. 
The process of a living creature slowly 
transformed into a physiological ash-heap, 
through the physiological wild-fires raging- 
through his substance. Employed as a vag- 
inal douche or rectal enema, the action of 
salt exhibits the same constitutional charac- 
teristics. The presence of the saline solution 
in the intestine starts at once its dual phase 
of activity — evaporation and condensation; 
the former expelling the bowel contents by 
the expansive force of the evolution of vapor, 
the latter causing a physiological drainage 
of the more or less congested mucous lining 
of the intestines. The former process empties 
the bowels through mechanical expulsion, 
the latter purges them by chemical dis- 
placement. By its nature a chemical ash, 
the action of salt on any tissue is toward 
reduction by processes identical to those 
that caused its own dissolution. The prac- 
tical application of salt as a therapeutic 
agent is thus indicated in cases wherever a 
reduction or drainage of tissues is required, 
as in the case of fatty degeneracy, adiposis,' 
congestion and inflammation of tissues, in- 
ternal or external. 

It is furthermore this characteristic of 
Sodmm Chloride that invests it with the 
power of a universal solvent. Albumen owes 

123 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

its solubility principally to the action of salt. 
It disolves pure casin and impedes the co- 
agulation of the fibrin of the blood. While 
the permanent constitutional presence of 
socium chloride in the blood shows but a 
small percentage, 5 to 1000, its incidental 
presence in pathological products is immense, 
indicating its great importance in processes 
of secretion and elimination of alien sub- 
stances. Hence in the course of any in- 
flammation, notably pneumonia, pleurites and 
hectic fevers, etc., the Sodium Chlorid of 
the system is so extensively engaged in 
neutralizing and normaHzing the pathological 
processes that for the time being it entirely 
disappears from the urine. Its return in 
the urinary excretions is in the nature of a 
critical phenomenon and marks the subsi- 
dence of the inflammation. It is this im- 
portance of salt in the system as a patho- 
logical adjuster and antitoxic corrective, that 
may explain the almost irresistable craving 
for salt by people whose foods are more 
or less made up by toxic elements, such as 
grease, alcohol, pastry and dried beans, etc. 
-—a craving which has no basis in the attrac- 
tiveness of its taste, and yet exceeds by far 
the physiological need of the system. 

In ulceration and infection of the bowel, 
there is no remedy surpassing in safety salt 

124 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

efficiency, a gallon of warm, normal and 
solution retained in the bowel some ten or 
fifteen minutes and then permitted to slowly 
pass out. In diabetes, uremia, typhoid, in- 
testinal catarrh, etc., the curative power of 
saline enimas in eliminating decomposing 
and coagulated albumen and catarrhal sloughs 
are really surprising. If aided by diet, a 
proper colon treatment of saline solution may 
permanently remove the evil of constipation. 
In the vomiting of pregnancy, injections of 
saline solutions, either per rectum or hypo- 
dermically, have often cured where other 
remedies have failed. 

Latest pronouncements of leading Euro- 
pean physicians, such as Dr. Huebsch, of 
the Imperial Hospital, Berlin, or Dr. William 
Hampdon, of London, are strongly in favor 
of salt as an internal remedy in the treatment 
of asthma and tuberculosis. Dr. Bourchardat 
of Vienna, observes that salt lessens the 
excretion of sugar in diabetes, and even 
diminished thirst. A recent writer in the 
London Lancet, claims that doses of 150 
grains have cured intermittent fever. 

In his famous system of Saline Therapy, 
the late Dr. Burgess, of Chattanooga, Tenn., 
has made wonderful discoveries in the healing 
powers of salt (Magnesium Sulphate, or 
Epsum Salt) in its application to human 

125 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

ailments. One pound of this salt to each 
five gallons of bloodwarm water, taken either 
in the form of sitz bath, tub-bath, towel- 
bath, or internal-bath (enema) will accom- 
plish wonders in ulcerations of the skin, in 
rheumatism and congestion in external organs. 
For nervous subjects, a small pinch of 
ordinary table-salt in a glass of water, early 
in the morning, will arrest interior decom- 
position by a stimulation of healthy granu- 
lation, and thus increase health and strength. 
Its anticeptic qualities are readily seen in 
its power to destroy fetor from gangrenous 
sores and coagulated albumen and putrid 
casein. In fact its virtues are so universal 
in relation to the needs of the creatures of 
evolution, that its disappearance from na- 
ture would mean the extinguishing from 
the earth, with the exception of the Arctics, 
of everv trace of oro-anized life. 



126 



CHAPTER XXIX 

THE VALUE OF SALT IN FOOD 

The demand for salt in human nature, 
either consciously, as in the promptings of 
taste, or subconsciously, as in the elemental 
affinities of nutritional chemistry, is not a 
mere whim or caprice of a sportive sensation, 
developed into abnormal cravings, but the 
voice of a deep-going, fundamental, nutri- 
tional need. 

The relation of salt to food is governed by 
the same principles as its relation to medicine. 
It is the principle of invigoration, arising 
from the processes of absorption and elimi- 
nation; of condensation and evaporation. 
In the cooking and preparation of food, salt 
becomes a saving force in the chemistry of 
digestion. In place of having to supply 
from its own vital resources the vigor and 
strength lacking in cooked food, the system, 
by the action of salt, receives an artificial 
impulse for its digestion, by which the food- 
cells become receptive and responsive to the 

127 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

dissolving and peptonizing actions of the 
digestive fluids. 

From this, however, it is readily seen, 
that though salt added to the products of 
cookery, is a positive aid to digestion and 
assimilation; if used with fresh, uncooked 
vegetables, may give rise to excess. Nature 
needs no digestant for her products as long 
as the pistons and levers of her vito-mag- 
netic mechanism are still intact, and un- 
hampered by the wrecks of coagulated al- 
buminoids and collapsed vascular viaducts, 
as the result of artificially-prepared food- 
stuffs. The presence of fresh, uncooked, 
unartificial foodstuffs in the stomach, brings 
out the full, unmodified charge of the virile, 
life-stirring, cell-energizing potency of the 
gastric secretions, adequate to deal with any 
food is useful and needful for individual 
health and strength. This, however, is not 
to serve as an argument in favor of the 
system of ^^unfired" or uncooked food, as no 
single ^'system," fired or unfired, can ever 
meet the requirements of individual physio- 
logical differences. If all stomachs were 
charged alike with unhampered natural vir- 
ility, no cooking would be needed, but there 
are stomachs too feeble to respond to the 
strong polarizations of ''unfired" food. The 
invalid stomach, having lost or forfeited its 

128 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

constitutional birth-right of native nerve 
power, must need to have the spirit of the 
food reduced to a level of its own subdued 
life — a reduction easily attained by cookery. 
Hence cookery is a valuable expediency, and 
serves as an opiate to an over-wrought and 
over-balanced gastric nerve mechanism. 

It is here, however, that salt comes in as 
a redeeming power to substitute, dynamically, 
w^hat the food lost, vitally. By its power of 
inducing increased cellular drainage in vas- 
cular exchanges of the tissues, salt is capable 
of imparting a new impulse to the food, as 
the latter has been rendered inert, and vi- 
tally reduced, through cookery. And further- 
more, it is this artificially induced explosions 
in the contents of the stomach, due to the 
expansive and condensive force of salt, that 
accounts for its tonic effect upon digestion. 

On the other hand, as the general demand 
of the system for salt depends on the per- 
centage of hydrochloric acid in the gastric 
secretions, the amount of salt to be used in 
the diet is not only to be governed by the 
cooked or uncooked condition of the food, 
but also by the composition of the gastric 
juices. And as the percentage of the gas- 
tric acidity, barring accidental irregularities, 
has its cause and root in mental conditions, 

129 



Sugar and Salt — Foods or Poison? 

individual characteristics as a force in diet 
must never be lost sight of. 

Nervous irritability and excess of Hydro- 
chloric acid in the digestion are closely 
associated conditions. The high strung, ner- 
vous individual, with his gastric secretions 
already overcharged with hydrochloric acid, 
has positive needs for the solidifying in- 
fluences due to the use of salt; while the 
individual of the phlegmatic type, with im- 
perturbal nerves and fatty inclinations must 
lie guarded as to his use of a general saline 
seasoning of his cooked food-stuffs. 

In the use of salt we have constantly be- 
fore us the principle of excess and balance. 
The same force which, if used in accordance 
with physiological needs, will aid our di- 
gestion and circulation, — if used in excess 
of these needs, will strike us with hardening 
of the tissues, evaporation of the fluids, 
crystalization of the solids, and a fatal 
process of systemic calcification which, by 
transfixing the whole vascular exchange, may 
terminate into hopeless progressive regidity. 

In the relation which the individual oc- 
cupies to his environments he is continually 
brought to face the supreme lesson of self- 
control and self-renunciation — with useful- 
ness and altruism as the motive powers of 
human existence. 

THE END. 



130 



NEW EDITION— REVISED AND ENLARGED 

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Prolonging Human Life 
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By Dr. AXEL EMIL GIBSON 
INDEX 

1. The Chemistry of Digestion 

2. The Significance of Food-Combinations 

3. Why Mixtures of Fruits With Other Foods 

Gives Rise to Indigestion 

4. The Bald Truths About Sweets 

5. The Danger of Too Good a Stomach 

6. The Diet That Leads to Health, Strength and 

Beauty 

7. Meat as a Factor in Diet 

8. Why One Man's Meat Is Another Mjm's Poison 

9. The Agreeable Diet Not Always the Safe Diet 

10. The Effect of Mind on Diet 

11. The Moral Tone in Diet 

12. Diet As a Social Duty 

13. What Will Be Man's Future Diet 
14- The Seasons and Diet 

15. Ices and Spices in Diet 

16. The Individuality and Diet 

17. One Week of Hygienic Diet 

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The Quantity and Quality 
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INDEX 

I. What We Mean By a System of Diet 

II. The Mechanistic Theory of Diet 

III. Diet As a Theory and Diet As a Fact 

IV. Diet Without InclividuaUty, a Fallacy 

V. Hygienic Diet Inseparable From Hygienic 

Breathing 
VI. Morality As An Aid To Diet 

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A STUDY IN CHILD-LIFE 
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3. Unaided Nature Fails. 

4. John Fiske and Thomas Huxley on the ''Incul- 

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5. Is It True That ''The appeal to the better feelings 

of the child before eight or ten or over twelve 
years of age is irrational, and often does little 
more than make a hypocrite of him before his 
time?" 

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8. "Romancing" — Not Identical with Fiction. 

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